The Prophet and The Proletariat

Chris Harman

Introduction
The politics of the Middle East and beyond have been dominated by Islamist movements at least
since the Iranian revolution of 1978-9. Variously described in the West as “Islamic
fundamentalism”, “Islamicism”, “integrism”, “political Islam” and “Islamic revivalism”, these
movements stand for the “regeneration” of society through a return to the original teachings of the
prophet Mohammed. They have become a major force in Iran and the Sudan (where they still hold
power), Egypt, Algeria and Tajikistan (where they are involved in bitter armed struggles against the
state), Afghanistan (where rival Islamist movements have been waging war with each other since
the collapse of the pro-Russian government), the occupied West Bank of the Jordan (where their
militancy is challenging the old PLO hegemony over the Palestinian resistance), Pakistan (where
they make up a significant portion of the opposition) and most recently Turkey (where the Welfare
Party has taken control of Istanbul, Ankara and many other municipalities).
The rise of these movements has been an enormous shock to the liberal intelligentsia and has
produced a wave of panic among people who believed that “modernisation”, coming on top of the
victory of the anti-colonial struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, would inevitably lead to more
enlightened and less repressive societies. [1]
Instead they witness the growth of forces which seem to look back to a more restricted society
which forces women into purdah, uses terror to crush free thought and threatens the most barbaric
punishments on those who defy its edicts. In countries like Egypt and Algeria the liberals are now
lining up with the state, which has persecuted and imprisoned them in the past, in the war it is
waging against Islamist parties.
But it has not only been liberals who have been thrown into disarray by the rise of Islamism. So too
has the left. It has not known how to react to what it sees as an obscurantist doctrine, backed by
traditionally reactionary forces, enjoying success among some of the poorest groups in society. Two
opposed approaches have resulted.
The first has been to see Islamism as Reaction Incarnate, as a form of fascism. This was, for
example, the position taken soon after the Iranian revolution by the then left wing academic Fred
Halliday, who referred to the Iranian regime as “Islam with a fascist face”. [2] It is an approach
which much of the Iranian left came to adopt after the consolidation of the Khomeini regime in
1981-2. And it is accepted by much of the left in Egypt and Algeria today. Thus, for example, one
Algerian revolutionary Marxist group has argued that the principles, ideology and political action of
the Islamist FIS “are similar to those of the National Front in France”, and that it is “a fascist
current”. [3]
Such an analysis easily leads to the practical conclusion of building political alliances to stop the
fascists at all costs. Thus Halliday concluded that the left in Iran made the mistake of not allying
with the “liberal bourgeoisie” in 1979-81 in opposition to “the reactionary ideas and policies of
Khomeini”. [4] In Egypt today the left, influenced by the mainstream communist tradition,
effectively supports the state in its war against the Islamists.
The opposite approach has been to see the Islamist movements as “progressive”, “anti-imperialist”
movements of the oppressed. This was the position taken by the great bulk of the Iranian left in the
first phase of the 1979 revolution, when the Soviet influenced Tudeh Party, the majority of the
Fedayeen guerrilla organisation and the left Islamist People’s Mojahedin all characterised the forces
behind Khomeini as “the progressive petty bourgeoisie”. The conclusion of this approach was that
Khomeini deserved virtually uncritical support. [5] A quarter of a century before this the Egyptian
Communists briefly took the same position towards the Muslim Brotherhood, calling on them to
join in “a common struggle against the ‘fascist dictatorship’ of Nasser and his ‘Anglo-American
props’”. [6]
I want to argue that both positions are wrong. They fail to locate the class character of modern
Islamism or to see its relationship to capital, the state and imperialism.

Notes
1. Thus a perceptive study of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood could conclude in 1969 that the
attempt at the revival of the movement in the mid-1960s “was the predictable eruption of the
continuing tensions caused by an ever dwindling activist fringe of individuals dedicated to an
increasingly less relevant Muslim ‘position’ about society.” R.P. Mitchell, The Society of the
Muslim Brothers (London, 1969), p.vii.
2. Article in the New Statesman in 1979, quoted by Fred Halliday himself in The Iranian Revolution
and its Implications, New Left Review, 166 (November December 1987), p.36.
3. Interview with the Communist Movement of Algeria (MCA) in Socialisme Internationale (Paris,
June 1990). The MCA itself no longer exists.
4. F. Halliday, op. cit., p.57.
5. For an account of the support given by different left organisations to the Islamists see P. Marshall,
Revolution and Counter Revolution in Iran (London, 1988), pp.60-68 and pp.89-92; M. Moaddel,
Class, Politics and Ideology in the Iranian Revolution (New York, 1993), pp.215-218; V. Moghadan,
False Roads in Iran, New Left Review, p.166.
6. Pamphlet quoted in R.P. Mitchell, op. cit., p.127.

The class base of Islamism

Islamism has arisen in societies traumatised by the impact of capitalism – first in the form of
external conquest by imperialism and then, increasingly, by the transformation of internal social
relations accompanying the rise of a local capitalist class and the formation of an independent
capitalist state.
Old social classes have been replaced by new ones, although not instantaneously or in a clear cut
manner. What Trotsky described as “combined and uneven development” has occurred. Externally,
colonialism has retreated, but the great imperialist powers – especially the US – continue to use
their military forces as a bargaining tool to influence the production of the Middle East’s single
major resource, oil. Internally, state encouragement – and often ownership – has led to the
development of some large scale modern industry, but large sectors of “traditional” industry remain,
based on vast numbers of small workshops where the owner works with a couple of workers, often
from his own family. Land reform has turned some peasants into modern capitalist farmers – but
displaced many more, leaving them with little or no land, so forcing them to eke out a livelihood
from casual labour in the workshops or markets of sprawling urban slums. A massive expansion of
the education system is turning out vast numbers of high school and college graduates, but these
then find insufficient job opportunities in the modern sectors of the economy and place their hopes
on getting into the state bureaucracy, while eking out a living with scraps of work around the
informal sector – touting for custom from shopkeepers, acting as guides for tourists, selling lottery
tickets, driving taxis and so on.
The crises of the world economy over the last 20 years have aggravated all these contradictions.
The modern industries have found the national economy too small for them to operate efficiently,
but the world economy too competitive for them to survive without state protection. The traditional
industries have not generally been able to modernise without state support and they cannot
compensate for the failure of modern industry to provide jobs for the burgeoning urban population.
But a few sectors have managed to establish links of their own with international capital and
increasingly resent the state’s domination of the economy. The urban rich increasingly lap up the
luxury goods available on the world market, creating growing resentment among the casual workers
and the unemployed.
Islamism represents an attempt to come to terms with these contradictions by people who have been
brought up to respect traditional Islamic ideas. But it does not find its support equally in all sections
of society. For some sections embrace a modern secular bourgeois or nationalist ideology, while
other sections gravitate towards some form of secular working class response. The Islamic revival
gets sustenance from four different social groupings – each of which interprets Islam in its own
way.

i. The Islamism of the old exploiters: First there are those members of the traditional privileged
classes who fear losing out in the capitalist modernisation of society – particularly landowners
(including clergy dependent on incomes from land belonging to religious foundations), traditional
merchant capitalists, the owners of the mass of small shops and workshops. Such groups have often
been the traditional sources of finance for the mosques and see Islam as a way of defending their
established way of life and of making those who oversee change listen to their voices. Thus in Iran
and Algeria it was this group which provided the resources to the clergy to oppose the state’s land
reform programme in the 1960s and 1970s.

ii. The Islamism of the new exploiters: Second, often emerging from among this first group, are
some of the capitalists who have enjoyed success despite hostility from those groups linked to the
state. In Egypt, for instance, the present day Muslim Brotherhood “wormed their way into the
economic fabric of Sadat’s Egypt at a time when whole sections of it had been turned over to
unregulated capitalism. Uthman Ahmad Uthman, the Egyptian Rockefeller, made no secret of this
sympathy for the Brethren”. [15]
In Turkey the Welfare Party, which is led by a former member of the main conservative party,
enjoys the support of much of middle sized capital. In Iran among the bazaaris who gave support to
Khomeini against the Shah were substantial capitalists resentful at the way economic policies
favoured those close to the crown.

iii. The Islamism of the poor: The third group are the rural poor who have suffered under the
advance of capitalist farming and who have been forced into the cities as they desperately look for
work. Thus in Algeria out of a total rural population of 8.2 million only 2 million gained anything
from the land reform. The other 6 million were faced with the choice between increased poverty in
the countryside and going to the cities to seek work. [16] But in the cities: “The lowest group are
the hard core jobless made up of displaced former peasants who have flooded the cities in search of
work and social opportunity ... detached from rural society without being truly integrated into urban
society”. [17]
They lost the certainties associated with an old way of life – certainties which they identify with
traditional Muslim culture – without gaining a secure material existence or a stable way of life:
“Clear guidelines for behaviour and belief no longer exist for millions of Algerians caught between
a tradition that no longer commands their total loyalty and a modernism that cannot satisfy the
psychological and spiritual needs of young people in particular”. [18]
In such a situation even Islamic agitation against land reform on behalf of the old landowners in the
1970s could appeal to the peasants and ex-peasants. For the land reform could be a symbol of a
transformation of the countryside that had destroyed a secure, if impoverished, way of life. “To the
landed proprietors and the peasants without land, the Islamists held out the same prospect: the
Koran stigmatised the expropriation of things belonging to others; it recommended to the rich and
those who ruled according to the Sunna to be generous to others”. [19]
The appeal of Islamism grew through the 1980s as economic crisis increased the contrast between
the impoverished masses and the elite of about 1 percent of the population who run the state and the
economy. Their wealth and their Westernised lifestyles ill fitted their claim to be the heirs of the
liberation struggle against the French. It was very easy for the ex-peasants to identify the “non-
Islamic” behaviour of this elite as the cause of their own misery.
In Iran likewise the capitalist transformation of agriculture embodied in the Shah’s land reform of
the 1960s benefitted a minority of the toilers, while leaving the rest no better off and sometimes
worse off. It increased the antagonism of the rural and recently urbanised poor against the state – an
antagonism which did no harm to Islamic forces which had opposed the land reform. So when, for
instance, in 1962 the Shah used the forces of the state against Islamic figures, this turned them into
a focus for the discontent of very large numbers of people.
In Egypt the “opening up” of the economy to the world market through agreements with the World
Bank and the IMF from the mid-1970s onwards substantially worsened the situation of the mass of
peasants and ex-peasants, creating enormous pools of bitterness. And in Afghanistan the land
reforms which were imposed after the PDPA (Communist Party) coup of 1978 led to a series of
spontaneous risings from all sections of the rural population:
The reforms put an end to the traditional ways of working based on mutual self interest without
introducing any alternative. The landowners who had been dispossessed of their land were careful
not to distribute any seed to their sharecroppers; people who traditionally had been willing to
provide loans now refused to do so. There were plans for the creation of a bank for agricultural
development and for setting up an office to oversee the distribution of seed and fodder, but none of
this had been done when the reforms actually took place ... So it was the very act of announcing the
reforms that cut the peasant off from his seed supplies ... The reform destroyed not just the
economic structure but the whole social framework of production ... It is not surprising, therefore,
that instead of setting 98 percent of the people against 2 percent of the exploiting classes, these
reforms led to a general revolt of 75 percent of the rural areas. [And] when the new system was seen
not to be working [even] the peasants who had initially welcomed reform felt they would be better
off going back to the old system. [20]
But it is not only hostility to the state that makes ex-peasants receptive to the message of the
Islamists. The mosques provide a social focus for people lost in a new and strange city, the Islamic
charities the rudiments of welfare services (clinics, schooling, etc) which are lacking from the state.
So in Algeria the growth of the cities in the 1970s and 1980s was accompanied by a massive
increase in the number of mosques: “Everything happened as if the paralysis in education and
Arabisation, the absence of structures of culture and leisure, the lack of space for public liberty, the
shortage of homes, made thousands of adults, youth and children disposed for the mosques”. [21]
In this way, funds which came from those with diametrically opposed interests to the mass of
people – from the old landowning class, the new rich or the Saudi government – could provide both
a material and a cultural haven for the poor. “In the mosque, everyone – new or old bourgeois,
fundamentalist, worker in an enterprise – saw the possibility of the elaboration or realisation of his
own strategy, dreams and hopes”. [22]
This did not obliterate the class divisions within the mosque. In Algeria, for example, there were
innumerable rows in mosque committees between people whose different social background made
them see the building of the mosques in different ways – for instance, over when they should refuse
to accept donations for the mosque because they came from sinful (haram) sources. “It is rare in fact
for a religious committee to accomplish its mandate, fixed in principle at two years, with the
harmony and agreement recommended by the cult of the unity of the divine which the muezzins
chant without cease.” [23] But the rows remained cloaked in a religious guise – and have not
stopped the proliferation of the mosques and the growth in the influence of Islamism.

iv. The Islamism of the new middle class: However, neither the “traditional” exploiting classes nor
the impoverished masses provide the vital element which sustains revivalist, political Islam – the
cadre of activists who propagate its doctrines and risk injury, imprisonment and death in
confrontation with their enemies.
The traditional exploiting classes are by their very nature conservative. They are prepared to donate
money so that others can fight – especially in defence of their material interests. They did so when
faced with the land reform in Algeria in the early 1970s; when the Baathist regime in Syria
encroached upon the interests of the urban merchants and traders in the spring of 1980s; [24] and
when the merchants and small businessmen of the Iranian bazaars felt themselves under attack from
the Shah in 1976-78 and threatened by the left in 1979-81. But they are wary of putting their own
businesses, let alone their own lives, at risk. And so they can hardly be the force that has torn
societies like Algeria and Egypt apart, caused a whole town, Hama, to rise in revolt in Syria, used
suicide bombs against the Americans and Israelis in Lebanon – and which caused the Iranian
Revolution to take a turn much more radical than any section of the Iranian bourgeoisie expected.
This force, in fact, comes from a fourth, very different stratum – from a section of the new middle
class that has arisen as a result of capitalist modernisation right across the Third World.
In Iran the cadres of all three of the Islamist movements that dominated the politics of the first years
of the revolution came from this background. Thus one account tells of the support for the first post-
revolutionary prime minister, Bazargan:
As Iran’s educational system expanded in the 1950s and 1960s, even wider groups of traditional
middle class people gained access to the country’s universities. Confronted with institutions
dominated by the older, Westernised elites, these newcomers to academia felt an urgent need to
justify their continued adherence to Islam to themselves. They joined the Muslim Students
Associations [run by Bazargan etc] ... upon entering professional life, the new engineers often
joined the Islamic Association of Engineers, also founded by Bazargan. This association network
constituted the real organised social support for Bazargan and Islamic modernism ... Bazargan’s and
Taleqani’s appeal [depended on] the way they gave the rising members of the traditional middle
classes a sense of dignity which allowed them to affirm their identity in a society politically
dominated by what they saw as a Godless, Westernised and corrupt elite. [25]
Writing of the People’s Mojahedin of Iran, Abrahamian comments that many studies of the first
years of the Iranian Revolution have talked of the appeal of radical Islam to the “oppressed”, but
that it was not the oppressed in general who formed the basis of the Mojahedin; rather it was that
very large section of the new middle class whose parents had been part of the traditional petty
bourgeoisie. He gives breakdowns of the occupations of Mojahedin arrested under the Shah and
subject to repression under Khomeini to support his argument. [26]
Although the third Islamist force, the ultimately victorious Islamic Republican Party of Khomeini,
is usually thought of as run by the clergy linked to the traditional bazaari merchant capitalists,
Moaddel has shown that more than half its MPs were from the professions, teachers, government
employees or students – even if a quarter came from bazaari families. [27] And Bayat has noted that
in their struggle to defeat the workers’ organisations in the factories, the regime could rely on the
professional engineers who worked there. [28]
Azar Tabari notes that after the downfall of the Shah very large numbers of women in the Iranian
cities opted to wear the veil and lined up with the followers of Khomeini against the left. She claims
these women came from that section of the middle class that was the first generation to undergo a
process of “social integration”. Often from traditional petty bourgeois families – with fathers who
were bazaar merchants, tradesmen and so on – they were forced into higher education as traditional
opportunities for their families to make money declined with industrialisation. There were openings
for them in professions like teaching and nursing. But “these women had to go through the often
painful and traumatic experience of first generation adjustment”:
As the young women from such families began to go to universities or work in hospitals, all these
traditional concepts came under daily attack from “alien” surroundings, where women mixed with
men, wore no veils, and sometimes dressed according to the latest European fashions. Women were
often torn between accepted family norms and the pressure of the new environment. They could not
be veiled at work, nor could they leave home unveiled.
One widespread response to these contradictory pressures was “a retreat into Islam”, “symbolised
by deliberately veiled women demonstrators during large mobilisations”. Tabari claims this
response stood in marked contrast to that of women whose families had been part of the new middle
class for two or three generations, and who refused to wear the veil and identified with the liberals
or the left. [29] In Afghanistan, Roy notes:
The Islamist movement was born in the modern sectors of society and developed from a critique of
the popular movements that preceded it ... The Islamists are intellectuals, the products of modernist
enclaves within traditional society; their social origins are what we have termed the state
bourgeoisie – products of the government education system which only leads to employment in the
state machine ... The Islamists are products of the state educational system. Very few of them have
an education in the arts. On the campus they mostly mix with the Communists, with whom they are
violently opposed, rather that with the ulama [religious scholars] towards whom they have an
ambivalent attitude. They share many beliefs in common with the ulama, but Islamist thought has
developed from contact with the great western ideologies, which they see as holding the key to the
west’s technical development. For them, the problem is to develop a modern political ideology
based upon Islam, which they see as the only way to come to terms with the modern world and the
best means of confronting foreign imperialism. [30]
In Algeria the most important recruitment ground for the FIS has been among Arabic speaking (as
opposed to French speaking) high school and university students, and that wide section of youth
that would like to be students but cannot get college places:
The FIS draws its membership from three sections of the population: the commercial middle
classes, including some who are quite rich, a mass of young people who are unemployed and
excluded from higher education, forming the new lumpen proletariat of the streets, and a layer of
upwardly mobile Arab speaking intellectuals. These last two groups are the most numerous and
important. [31]
The Islamic intellectuals have made careers for themselves through their domination of the
theological and Arab language faculties of the universities, using these to gain control of many of
the positions as imams in the mosques and teachers in the lycees (high schools). They form a
network that ensures the recruitment of more Islamists to such positions and the inculcation of
Islamist ideas into the new generation of students. This in turn has enabled them to exert influence
over vast numbers of young people.
Ahmed Rouadia writes that the Islamist groups began to grow from the mid-1970s onwards,
receiving support in the universities from Arab speaking students who found their lack of fluency in
French kept them from getting jobs in administration, areas of advanced technology and higher
management. [32] Thus, there was, for instance, a bitter conflict with the principal of Constantine
university in the mid-1980s, who was accused of impugning the “dignity of Arab language” and
“being loyal to French colonialism” for allowing French to remain the predominant language in the
science and technology faculties [33]:
The qualified Arab speakers find access blocked to all the key sectors, above all in industries
requiring technical knowledge and foreign languages ... The Arab speakers, even if they have
diplomas, cannot get a place in modern industry. For the most part they end by turning towards the
mosque. [34]
The students, the recent Arab speaking graduates and, above all, the unemployed ex-students form a
bridge to the very large numbers of discontented youth outside the colleges who find they cannot
get college places despite years spent in an inefficient and underfunded educational system. Thus,
although there are now nearly a million students in secondary education, up to four fifths of them
can expect to fail the bacalauriate – the key to entry into university – and to face a life of insecurity
on the margins of employment: [35]
Integrism [Islamism] gets its strength from the social frustrations which afflict a large part of the
youth, those left out of account by the social and economic system. Its message is simple: If there is
poverty, hardship and frustration, it is because those who have power do not base themselves on the
legitimacy of shorah [consultation], but simply on force ... The restoration of the Islam of the first
years would make the inequalities disappear. [36]
And through its influence over a wide layer of students, graduates and the intellectual unemployed,
Islamism is able to spread out to dominate the propagation of ideas in the slums and shanty towns
where the expeasants live. Such a movement cannot be described as a “conservative” movement.
The educated, Arab speaking youth do not turn to Islam because they want things to stay as they
are, but because they believe it offers massive social change. [37]
In Egypt the Islamist movement first developed some 65 years ago, when Hassan al-Banna formed
the Muslim Brotherhood. It grew in the 1930s and 1940s as disillusionment set in with the failure of
the secular nationalist party, the Wafd, to challenge British domination of the country. The base of
the movement consisted mainly of civil servants and students, and it was one of the major forces in
the university protests of the late 1940s and early 1950s. [38] But it spread out to involve some
urban labourers and peasants, with a membership estimated to have peaked at half a million. In
building the movement Banna was quite willing to collaborate with certain figures close to the
Egyptian monarchy, and the right wing of the Wafd looked on the Brotherhood as a counter to
communist influence among workers and students. [39]
But the Brotherhood could only compete with the communists for the support of the impoverished
middle classes – and via them to sections of the urban poor – because its religious language
concealed a commitment to reform which went further than its right wing allies wished. Its
objectives were “ultimately incompatible with the perpetuation of the political, economic and social
status quo to which the ruling groups were dedicated”. This ensured “the liaison between the
Muslim Brotherhood and the conservative rulers would be both unstable and tenuous”. [40]
The Brotherhood was virtually destroyed once a new military regime around Abdul Nasser had
concentrated full power into its hands in the early 1950s. Six of the Brotherhood’s leaders were
hanged in December 1954 and thousands of its members thrown into concentration camps. An
attempt to revive the movement in the mid-1960s led to still more executions, but then, after
Nasser’s death, his successors Sadat and Mubarak allowed it to lead a semi-legal existence –
provided it avoided any head on confrontation with the regime. The leadership of what is sometimes
called the “Neo-Islamic Brotherhood” has been willing to accept these restraints, following a
relatively “moderate” and “reconciliatory” approach, getting large sums of money from members
who were exiled to Saudi Arabia in the 1950s and prospered from the oil boom. [41] This has
enabled the Brothers to provide “an alternative model of a Muslim state” with “their banks, social
services, educational services and ... their mosques”. [42]
But it has also led them to lose influence over a new generation of radical Islamists which has
arisen, as the Brotherhood itself originally did, from the universities and the impoverished section
of the “modern” middle class. These are the Islamists who were responsible for the assassination of
Sadat in 1981 and who have been waging armed struggle ever since both against the state and
against the secular intelligentsia:
When we speak of the fundamentalists in Egypt, what we mean is a minority group of people who
are even against the Moslem Brothers ... These groups are composed mainly of youth ... They are
very pure people, they are prepared to sacrifice their lives, to do anything ... And they are used as
the spearheads of the different movements because they are able to undertake terrorist actions. [43]
The Islamist student associations which became a dominant force in Egyptian universities during
Sadat’s presidency “constituted the Islamicist movement’s only genuine mass organisations”. [44]
They grew in reaction to conditions in the universities and to the dismal prospects facing students if
they succeeded in graduating:
The number of students rose from slightly less than 200,000 in 1970 to more than half a million in
1977 ... In the absence of the necessary resources, providing free high education for the greatest
possible number of the country’s youth has produced a system of cut rate education. [45]
Overcrowding represents a particular problem for female students, who find themselves subject to
all sorts of harassment in the lecture theatres and overcrowded buses. In response to this situation,
The jamaa al islamiyya [Islamic associations] drew their considerable strength from their ability to
identify [these problems] and to pose immediate solutions – for instance, using student unions funds
to run minibuses for female students [giving priority to those who wore the veil], calling for
separate rows in the lecture theatres for women and men, organising course revision groups which
met in the mosques, turning out cheap editions of essential textbooks. [46]
Graduating students do not escape the endemic poverty of much of Egyptian society:
Every graduate has the right to public employment. This measure is actually the purveyor of
massive disguised unemployment in the offices of a swollen administration in which employees are
badly paid ... He can still manage to feed himself by buying the state subsidised products, but he is
unlikely to rise above the bare level of subsistence ... Almost every state employee has a second or a
third job ... Innumerable employees who sit all morning at desks in one or other of the countless
ministry offices spend the afternoon working as plumbers or taxi drivers, jobs they perform so
inadequately they might as well be filled by illiterates ... An illiterate peasant woman who arrives in
the city to land a job as a foreigner’s maid will be paid more or less double the salary of a university
assistant lecturer. [47]
The only way to get out of this morass for most graduates is to get a job abroad, especially in Saudi
Arabia or the Gulf states. And this is not just the only way out of poverty, it is, for most people, the
precondition for getting married in a society where pre-marital sexual relations are rare.
The Islamists were able to articulate these problems in religious language. As Kepel writes of one of
the leaders of one of the early Islamist sects, his position does not involve “acting as a fanatic for a
bygone century ... He is putting his finger – in his own way – on a crucial problem of contemporary
Egyptian society”. [48]
As in Algeria, once the Islamists had established a mass base in the universities, they were then in a
situation to spread out into a wider milieu – the milieu of the impoverished streets of the cities
where the students and ex-students mixed with a mass of other people scrabbling for a livelihood.
This began to happen after the regime clamped down hard on the Islamist movement in the
universities following the negotiation of the peace agreement with Israel in the late 1970s. “Far
from halting the jamaa, however, this harassment gave them a second wind ... the message of the
jamaa now began to spread beyond the world of students. Islamicist cadres and agitators went to
preach in the poor neighbourhoods”. [49]

Notes
15. G. Kepel, The Prophet and the Pharoah, Muslim Extremism in Egypt (London, 1985), p.109.
16. See, for example, K. Pfeifer, Agrarian Reform Under State Capitalism in Algeria (Boulder,
1985), p.59; C Andersson, Peasant or Proletarian? (Stockholm, 1986), p.67; M. Raffinot and P.
Jacquemot, Le Capitalisme d’état Algerien (Paris, 1977).
17. J.P. Entelis, Algeria, the Institutionalised Revolution (Boulder, 1986), p.76.
18. Ibid.
19. A. Rouadia, Les Freres et la Mosque (Paris, 1990), p.33.
20. O. Roy, op. cit., pp.88-90.
21. A. Rouadia, op. cit., p.82.
22. Ibid., p.78.
23. Ibid.
24. For an account of these events, see D. Hiro, Islamic Fundamentalism (London, 1989), p.97.
25. H.E. Chehabi, Iranian Politics and Religious Modernism (London, 1990), p.89.
26. E. Abrahamian, The Iranian Mojahedin (London, 1989), pp.107, 201, 214, 225-226.
27. M. Moaddel, op. cit., pp.224-238.
28. A. Bayat, Workers and Revolution in Iran (London, 1987), p.57.
29. A. Tabari, Islam and the Struggle for Emancipation of Iranian Women, in A. Tabari and N.
Yeganeh, In the Shadow of Islam: the Women’s Movement in Iran.
30. O. Roy, op. cit., pp.68-69.
31. M. Al-Ahnaf, B Botivewau and F. Fregosi, op. cit.
32. A. Rouadia, op. cit..
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. In 1989, of 250,000 who took exams, only 54,000 obtained the bac, Ibid., p.137.
36. Ibid., p.146.
37. Ibid., p.147.
38. See R.P. Mitchell, op. cit., p.13.
39. See Ibid., p.27.
40. Ibid., p.38.
41. M. Hussein, Islamic Radicalism as a Political Protest Movement, in N. Sa’dawi, S. Hitata, M.
Hussein and S. Safwat, Islamic Fundamentalism (London, 1989).
42. Ibid.
43. S. Hitata, East West Relations, in N. Sa’dawi, S. Hitata, M. Hussein and S. Safwat, op. cit., p.26.
44. G. Kepel, op. cit., p.129.
45. Ibid., p.137.
46. Ibid., pp.143-44.
47. Ibid., p.85.
48. Ibid., p.95-96.
49. Ibid., p.149.

Islam, religion and ideology

The confusion often starts with a confusion about the power of religion itself. Religious people see
it as a historical force in its own right, whether for good or for evil. So too do most bourgeois anti-
clerical and free thinkers. For them, fighting the influence of religious institutions and obscurantists
ideas is in itself the way to human liberation.
But although religious institutions and ideas clearly play a role in history, this does not happen in
separation from the rest of material reality. Religious institutions, with their layers of priests and
teachers, arise in a certain society and interact with that society. They can only maintain themselves
as society changes if they find some way of changing their own base of support. So, for instance,
one of the world’s major religious institutions, the Roman Catholic Church, originated in the late
ancient world and survived by adapting itself first to feudal society for 1,000 years and then, with
much effort, to the capitalist society that replaced feudalism, changing much of the content of its
own teaching in the process. People have always been capable of giving different interpretations to
the religious ideas they hold, depending on their own material situation, their relations with other
people and the conflicts they get involved in. History is full of examples of people who profess
nearly identical religious beliefs ending up on opposite sides in great social conflicts. This happened
with the social convulsions which swept Europe during the great crisis of feudalism in the 16th and
17th century, when Luther, Calvin, Munzer and many other “religious” leaders provided their
followers with a new world view through a reinterpretation of biblical texts.
Islam is no different to any other religion in these respects. It arose in one context, among a trading
community in the towns of 7th century Arabia, in the midst of a society still mainly organised on a
tribal basis. It flourished within the succession of great empires carved out by some of those who
accepted its doctrines. It persists today as the official ideology of numerous capitalist states (Saudi
Arabia, Sudan, Pakistan, Iran etc), as well as the inspiration of many oppositional movements.
It has been able to survive in such different societies because it has been able to adapt to differing
class interests. It has obtained the finance to build its mosques and employ its preachers in turn from
the traders of Arabia, the bureaucrats, landowners and merchants of the great empires, and the
industrialists of modern capitalism. But at the same time it has gained the allegiance of the mass of
people by putting across a message offering consolation to the poor and oppressed. At every point
its message has balanced between promising a degree of protection to the oppressed and providing
the exploiting classes with protection against any revolutionary overthrow.
So Islam stresses that the rich have to pay a 2.5 percent Islamic tax (the zakat) for the relief of the
poor, that rulers have to govern in a just way, that husbands must not mistreat their wives. But it
also treats the expropriation of the rich by the poor as theft, insists disobedience to a “just”
government is a crime to be punished with all the vigour of the law and provides women with fewer
rights than men within marriage, over inheritance, or over the children in the event of divorce. It
appeals to the wealthy and the poor alike by offering regulation of oppression, both as a bulwark
against still harsher oppression and as a bulwark against revolution. It is, like Christianity,
Hinduism or Buddhism, both the heart of the heartless world and the opium of the people.
But no set of ideas can have such an appeal to different classes, especially when society is shaken
by social convulsions, unless it is full of ambiguities. It has to be open to differing interpretations,
even if these set its adherents at each other’s throats.
This has been true of Islam virtually from its inception. After Mohammed’s death in 632 AD, just
two years after Islam had conquered Mecca, dissension broke out between the followers of Abu
Bakr, who became the first Caliph (successor to Mohammed as leader of Islam), and Ali, husband
of the prophet’s daughter Fatima. Ali claimed that some of Abu Bakr’s rulings were oppressive.
Dissension grew until rival Muslim armies fought each other at the battle of the Camel resulting in
10,000 deaths. It was out of this dissension that the separation of the Sunni and Shia versions of
Islam arose. This was but the first of many splits. Groups repeatedly arose who insisted that the
oppressed were suffering at the hands of the godless and demanded a return to the original “pure”
Islam of the prophet’s time. As Akbar S. Ahmed says:
Throughout Islamic history, Muslim leaders would preach a move to the ideal ... They gave
expression to often vague ethnic, social or political movements ... The basis was laid for the entire
schismatic gamut in Islamic thought from the Shia, with its offshoots like the Ismailis, to more
temporary movements ... Muslim history is replete with Mahdis leading revolts against established
authority and often dying for their efforts ... Leaders have often been poor peasants and from
deprived ethnic groups. Using Islamic idiom has reinforced their sense of deprivation and
consolidated the movement. [7]
But even mainstream Islam is not, in its popular forms at least, a homogenous set of beliefs. The
spread of the religion to cover the whole region from the Atlantic coast of north west Africa to the
Bay of Bengal involved the incorporation into Islamic society of peoples who fitted into Islam
many of their old religious practices, even if these contradicted some of Islam’s original tenets. So
popular Islam often includes cults of local saints or of holy relics even though orthodox Islam
regards such practices as sacrilegious idolatry. And Sufi brotherhoods flourish which, while not
constituting a formal rival to mainstream Islam, put an emphasis on mystical and magical
experience which many fundamentalists find objectionable. [8]
In such a situation, any call for a return to the practices of the prophet’s time is not in reality about
conserving the past but about reshaping people’s behaviour into something quite new.
This has been true of Islamic revivalism over the last century. It arose as an attempt to come to
terms with the material conquest and cultural transformation of Asia and North Africa by capitalist
Europe. The revivalists argued this had only been possible because the original Islamic values had
been corrupted by the worldly pursuits of the great medieval empires. Regeneration was only
possible by reviving the founding spirit of Islam as expressed by the first four Caliphs (or, for
Shiites, by Ali). It was in this spirit that Khomeini, for instance, could denounce virtually the whole
history of Islam for the last 1,300 years:
Unfortunately, true Islam lasted for only a brief period after its inception. First the Umayyids [the
first Arab dynasty after Ali] and then the Abbasids [who conquered them in 750 AD] inflicted all
kinds of damage on Islam. Later the monarchs ruling Iran continued in the same path; they
completely distorted Islam and established something quite diferent in its place. [9]
So, although Islamism can be presented by both defenders and opponents as a traditionalist
doctrine, based on a rejection of the modern world, in reality things are more complicated than this.
The aspiration to recreate a mythical past involves not leaving existing society intact, but recasting
it. What is more, the recasting cannot aim to produce a carbon copy of 7th century Islam, since the
Islamists do not reject every feature of existing society. By and large they accept modern industry,
modern technology and much of the science on which it is based – indeed, they argue that Islam, as
a more rational and less superstitious doctrine than Christianity, is more in tune with modern
science. And so the “revivalists” are, in fact, trying to bring about something which has never
existed before, which fuses ancient traditions and the forms of modern social life.
This means it is wrong simply to refer to all Islamists as “reactionary”, or to equate “Islamic
fundamentalism” as a whole with the sort of Christian fundamentalism which is the bastion of the
right wing of the Republican Party in the US. Figures like Khomeini, the heads of the rival
Mujahedin groups in Afghanistan or the leaders of the Algerian FIS may use traditionalist themes
and appeal to the nostalgia of disappearing social groups, but they also appeal to radical currents
produced as society is transformed by capitalism. Olivier Roy, referring to the Afghan Islamists,
argues that:
Fundamentalism is quite different (to traditionalism): for fundamentalism it is of paramount
importance to get back to the scriptures, clearing away the obfuscation of tradition. It always seeks
a return to a former state: it is characterised by the practice of re-reading texts and a search for
origins. The enemy is not modernity but tradition, or rather, in the context of Islam, of everything
which is not the Tradition of the Prophet. This is true reform ... [10]
Traditionalist Islam is an ideology which seeks to perpetuate a social order which is being
undermined by the development of capitalism – or at least, as with the version promoted by the
ruling family in Saudi Arabia, to hark back to this order in order to conceal the transformation of an
old ruling class into modern capitalists. Islamism is an ideology which, although it appeals to some
of the same themes, seeks to transform society, not to conserve it in the old way. For this reason,
even the term “fundamentalism” is not really appropriate. As Abrahamian has observed:
The label“ fundamentalism” implies religious inflexibility, intellectual purity, political
traditionalism, even social conservatism and the centrality of scriptural-doctrinal principles.
“Fundamentalism” implies rejection of the modern world. [11]
But, in fact, movements like that of Khomeini in Iran have been based on “ideological adaptability
and intellectual flexibility, with political protests against the established order, and with socio-
economic issues that fuel mass opposition to the status quo”. [12]
Yet there is often a blurring of the differences between Islamism and traditionalism. Precisely
because the notion of social regeneration is wrapped in religious language, it is open to different
interpretations. It can mean simply ending “degenerate practices” through a return to the forms of
behaviour which allegedly preceded the “corruption” of Islam” by “cultural imperialism”. The
stress then is on female “modesty” and the wearing of the veil, an end to “promiscuous” mixing of
the sexes in schools and workplaces, opposition to Western popular music and so on. Thus one of
the most popular leaders of the Algerian FIS, Ali Belhadj, can denounce the “violence” against
Muslims that comes from “cultural invasion”:
We Muslims believe that the most serious form of violence we have suffered is not physical
violence, for which we are ready ... It is the violence which represents a challenge to the Muslim
community by the imposition of diabolical legislation instead of the sharia ...
Is there any violence worse than that which consists in encouraging that which God has forbidden?
They open wine making enterprises, the work of the demon, and they are protected by the police ...
Can you conceive of any violence greater than that of this woman who burns the scarf in a public
place, in the eyes of everyone, saying the Family Code penalises women and finding support from
the effeminised, the halfmen and the transexuals ...
It is not violence to demand that woman stays at home, in an atmosphere of chastity, reserve and
humility and that she only goes out in cases of necessity defined by the legislator ... to demand the
segregation of sexes among school students and the absence of that stinking mixing that causes
sexual violence ... [13]
But regeneration can also mean challenging the state and elements of imperialism’s political
domination. Thus the Iranian Islamists did close down the biggest US “listening” station in Asia and
seize control of the US embassy. The Hezbollah in the southern Lebanon and Hamas in the West
Bank and Gaza have played a key role in the armed struggle against Israel. The Algerian FIS did
organise huge demonstrations against the US war against Iraq – even though these lost them their
Saudi funding. Regeneration can even mean, in certain instances, giving support to the material
struggles against exploitation of workers and peasants, as with the Iranian Mujahedin in 1979-82.
The different interpretations of regeneration naturally appeal to those from different social classes.
But the religious phraseology can prevent those involved recognising their differences with one
another. In the heat of the struggle individuals can mix the meanings together, so that the fight
against the unveiling of women is seen as the fight against the Western oil companies and the
abysmal poverty of the mass of people. Thus in Algeria in the late 1980s, Belhadj,
made himself the voice of all those with nothing to lose ... Conceiving Islam in its most pure
scriptural form, he preached strict application of its commandments ... Every Friday Belhadj made
war against the entire world, Jews and Christians, Zionists, communists and secularists, liberals and
agnostics, governments of the East and the West, Arab or Muslim heads of state, Westernised party
leaders and intellectuals, were the favourite targets of his weekly preaching. [14]
Yet beneath this confusion of ideas there were real class interests at work.

Notes
7. A.S. Ahmed, Discovering Islam (New Delhi, 1990), pp.61-64.
8. For an account of Afghan Sufism, see O. Roy, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan (Cambridge,
1990), pp.38-44. For Sufism in India and Pakistan, see A.S. Ahmed, op. cit., pp.90-98.
9. I. Khomeini, Islam and Revolution (Berkeley, 1981), quoted in A.S. Ahmed, op. cit. p.31.
10. O. Roy, op. cit., p5. A leading Islamist, Hassan al-Turabi, leader of the Sudanese Islamic
Brotherhood, argues exactly the same, calling for an Islamicisation of society because “religion can
become the most powerful motor of development”, in Le nouveau reveil de 1’Islam, Liberation
(Paris), 5 August, 1994.
11. E. Abrahamian, Khomeinism (London, 1993), p.2.
12. Ibid.
13. Who is responsible for violence? in l’Algerie par les Islamistes, edited by M. Al Ahnaf, B.
Botivewau and F. Fregosi (Paris, 1990), pp.132ff.
14. Ibid., p.31.

Radical Islam as a social movement

The class base of Islamism is similar to that of classical fascism and of the Hindu fundamentalism
of the BJP, Shiv Sena and RSS in India. All these movements have recruited from the white collar
middle class and students, as well as from the traditional commercial and professional petty
bourgeoisie. This, together with the hostility of most Islamist movements to the left, women’s rights
and secularism has led many socialist and liberals to designate the movements as fascist. But this is
a mistake.
The petty bourgeois class base has not only been a characteristic of fascism, it has also been a
feature of Jacobinism, of Third World nationalisms, of Maoist Stalinism, and Peronism. Petty
bourgeois movements only become fascist when they arise at a specific point in the class struggle
and play a particular role. This role is not just to mobilise the petty bourgeoisie, but to exploit the
bitterness they feel at what an acute crisis of the system has done to them and so turn them into
organised thugs prepared to work for capital to tear workers’ organisations apart.
That is why Mussolini’s and Hitler’s movements were fascist while, say, Peron’s movement in
Argentina was not. Even though Peron borrowed some of the imagery of fascism, he took power in
exceptional circumstances which allowed him to buy off workers’ organisations while using state
intervention to divert the profits of the large agrarian capitalists into industrial expansion. During
his first six years in office an specific set of circumstances allowed real wages to rise by about 60
percent. This was the complete opposite to what would have happened under a genuinely fascist
regime. Yet the liberal intelligentsia and the Argentine Communist Party were still capable of
referring to the regime as “Nazi Peronism”, in much the same way that much of the left
internationally refers to Islamism today. [50]
The Islamist mass movements in countries like Algeria and Egypt likewise play a different role to
that of fascism. They are not primarily directed against workers’ organisations and do not offer
themselves to the main sectors of capital as a way of solving its problems at workers’ expense. They
are often involved in direct, armed confrontation with the forces of the state in a way in which
fascist parties rarely have been. And, far from being direct agents of imperialism, these movements
have taken up anti-imperialist slogans and some anti-imperialist actions which have embarrassed
very important national and international capitalist interests (e.g. in Algeria over the second Gulf
War, in Egypt against “peace” with Israel, in Iran against the American presence in the aftermath of
the overthrow of the Shah).
The American CIA was able to work with Pakistan intelligence and the pro-Western Middle East
states to arm thousands of volunteers from right across the Middle East to fight against the Russians
in Afghanistan. But now these volunteers are returning home to discover they were fighting for the
US when they thought they were fighting “for Islam”, and constituting a bitter hard core of
opposition to most of the governments which encouraged them to go. Even in Saudi Arabia, where
the ultra-puritan Wahhabist interpretation of the Islamic sharia (religious law) is imposed with all
the might of the state, the opposition now claims the support of “thousands of Afghan fighters”,
disgusted by the hypocrisy of a royal family that is increasingly integrated into the world capitalist
ruling class. And the royal family is now retaliating, further antagonising some of the very people it
encouraged so much in the past, cutting off funds to the Algerian FIS for supporting Iraq in the
second Gulf War and deporting a Saudi millionaire who has been financing Islamists in Egypt.
Those on the left who see the Islamists simply as “fascists” fail to take into account the destabilising
effect of the movements on capital’s interests right across the Middle East, and end up siding with
states that are the strongest backers both of imperialism and of local capital. This has, for instance,
happened to those sections of the left influenced by the remnants of Stalinism in Egypt. It happened
to much of the Iranian left during the closing stages of the first Gulf War, when American
imperialism sent in its fleet to fight on the same side as Iraq against Iran. And it is in danger of
happening to the secular left in Algeria, faced with a near civil war between the Islamists and the
state.
But if it is wrong to see the Islamist movements as “fascist”, it is just as wrong to simply see them
as “anti-imperialist” or “anti-state”. They do not just fight against those classes and states that
exploit and dominate the mass of people. They also fight against secularism, against women who
refuse to abide by Islamic notions of “modesty”, against the left and, in important cases, against
ethnic or religious minorities. The Algerian Islamists established their hold on the universities in the
late 1970s and early 1980s by organising “punitive raids” against the left with the connivance of the
police, and the first person killed by them was not a state official but a member of a Trotskyist
organisation; another of their actions was to denounce Hard Rock Magazine, homosexuality, drugs
and punk at the Islamic book fair in 1985; in the Algerian towns where they are strongest, they do
organise attacks on women who dare to show a little of their skin; the first public demonstration of
the FIS in 1989 was in response to “feminist” and “secularist” demonstrations against Islamist
violence, of which women were the main victims. [51] Its hostility is directed not just against the
state and foreign capital, but also against the more than 1 million Algerian citizens who, through no
fault of their own, have been brought up with French as their first language, and the 10 percent of
the population who are Berber rather than Arabic speakers.
Similarly, in Egypt, the armed Islamic groups do murder secularists and Islamists who disagree
strongly with them; they do encourage communal hatred by Muslims, including pogroms, against
the 10 percent of the population who happen to be Coptic Christians. In Iran the Khomeini wing of
Islamism did execute some 100 people for “sexual offences” like homosexuality and adultery in
1979-81; they did sack women from the legal system and organise gangs of thugs, the Iranian
Hezbollah, to attack unveiled women and to assault left wingers; and they did kill thousands in the
repression of the left Islamist People’s Mujahedin. In Afghanistan the Islamist organisations which
waged a long and bloody war against the Russian occupation of their country did turn their heavy
weaponry on each other once the Russians had left, reducing whole areas of Kabul to rubble.
In fact, even when Islamists put the stress on “anti-imperialism”, they more often than not let
imperialism off the hook. For imperialism today is not usually the direct rule of Western states over
parts of the Third World, but rather a world system of independent capitalist classes (‘private” and
state), integrated into a single world market. Some ruling classes have greater power than others and
so are able to impose their own bargaining terms through their control over access to trade, the
banking system or on occasions crude force. These ruling classes stand at the top of a pinnacle of
exploitation, but those just below are the ruling classes of poorer countries, rooted in the individual
national economies, also gaining from the system, increasingly linking themselves into the
dominant multinational networks and buying into the economies of the advanced world, even if on
occasion they lash out at those above them.
The suffering of the great mass of people cannot simply be blamed on the great imperialist powers
and their agencies like the World Bank and the IMF. It is also a result of the enthusiastic
participation in exploitation of the lesser capitalists and their states. It is these who actually
implement the policies that impoverish people and wreck their lives. And it is these who use the
police and the prisons to crush those who try to resist.
There is an important difference here with what happened under the classic imperialism of the
colonial empires, where Western colonists manned the state and directed repression. The local
exploiting classes would be pulled two ways, between resisting a state when it trampled on their
interests, and collaborating with it as a bulwark against those they themselves exploited. But they
were not necessarily in the front line of defending the whole system of exploitation against revolt.
They are today. They are part of the system, even if they sometimes quarrel with it. They are no
longer its inconsistent opponents. [52]
In this situation any ideology which restricts itself to targeting foreign imperialism as the enemy
evades any serious confrontation with the system. It expresses people’s bitterness and frustration,
but evades focusing it on real enemies. This is true of most versions of Islamism, just as it is true
these days of most Third World nationalisms. They point to a real enemy, the world system, and on
occasions they clash bitterly with the state. But they absolve from responsibility most of the local
bourgeoisie – imperialism’s most important long term partner.
A recent study of Khomeinism in Iran by Abrahamian compares it with Peronism and similar forms
of “populism”:
Khomeini adopted radical themes ... At times he sounded more radical than the Marxists. But while
adopting radical themes he remained staunchly committed to the preservation of middle class
property. This form of middle class radicalism made him akin to Latin American populists,
especially the Peronists. [53]
And Abrahamian goes on to say:
By “populism” I mean a movement of the propertied middle class that mobilises the lower classes,
especially the urban poor, with radical rhetoric directed against imperialism, foreign capitalism, and
the political establishment ... Populist movements promise to drastically raise the standard of living
and make the country fully independent of outside powers. Even more important in attacking the
status quo with radical rhetoric, they intentionally stop short of threatening the petty bourgeoisie
and the whole principle of private property. Populist movements thus, inevitably, emphasise the
importance, not of economicsocial revolution, but of cultural, national and political reconstruction.
[54]
Such movements tend to confuse matters by moving from any real struggle against imperialism to a
purely ideological struggle against what they see as its cultural effects. “Cultural imperialism”,
rather than material exploitation, is identified as the source of everything that is wrong. The fight is
then not directed against forces really involved in impoverishing people, but rather against those
who speak “foreign” languages, accept “alien” religions or reject allegedly “traditional” lifestyles.
This is very convenient for certain sections of local capital who find it easy to practice the
“indigenous culture”, at least in public. It is also of direct material interest to sections of the middle
class who can advance their own careers by purging others from their jobs. But it limits the dangers
such movements present to imperialism as a system.
Islamism, then, both mobilises popular bitterness and paralyses it; both builds up people’s feelings
that something must be done and directs those feelings into blind alleys; both destabilises the state
and limits the real struggle against the state.
The contradictory character of Islamism follows from the class base of its core cadres. The petty
bourgeoisie as a class cannot follow a consistent, independent policy of its own. This has always
been true of the traditional petty bourgeoisie – the small shopkeepers, traders and self employed
professionals. They have always been caught between a conservative hankering for security that
looks to the past and a hope that they individually will gain from radical change. It is just as true of
the impoverished new middle class – or the even more impoverished would-be new middle class of
unemployed ex-students – in the less economically advanced countries today. They can hanker after
an allegedly golden past. They can see their futures as tied up with general social advance through
revolutionary change. Or they can blame the frustration of their aspirations on other sections of the
population who have got an “unfair” grip on middle class jobs: the religious and ethnic minorities,
those with a different language, women working in an “untraditional” way.
Which direction they turn in does not just depend on immediate material factors. It also depends on
the struggles that occur on a national and international scale. Thus in the 1950s and 1960s the
struggles against colonialism and imperialism did inspire much of the aspirant middle class of the
Third World, and there was a general feeling that state controlled economic development
represented the way forward. The secular left, or at least its Stalinist or nationalist mainstream, was
seen as embodying this vision, and it exercised a degree of hegemony in the universities. At that
stage even those who began with a religious orientation were attracted by what was seen as the left
– by the example of the Vietnamese War against America or by the so called cultural revolution in
China – and began to reject traditional religious thinking over, for instance, the women’s question.
This happened with the Catholic liberation theologists in Latin America and the People’s Mojahedin
in Iran. And even in Afghanistan the Islamist students
demonstrated against Zionism during the six-day war, against American policies in Vietnam and the
privileges of the establishment. They were violently opposed to important figures on the
traditionalist side, to the King and especially his cousin Daoud ... They protested against foreign
influences in Afghanistan, both from the Soviet Union and the West, and against the speculators
during the famine of 1972, by demanding there should be curbs on personal wealth. [55]
In the late 1970s and 1980s the mood changed. On the one hand there was the beginning of a global
wave of disillusionment with the so called “socialist” model presented by the Eastern European
states as a result of the killing fields of Cambodia, the mini-war between Vietnam and China, and
the move of China towards the American camp. This disillusionment grew in intensity in the later
1980s as a result of the changes in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the USSR.
It was even more intense in certain Middle Eastern countries than elsewhere in the world because
the illusions had not merely been a question of foreign policy. The local regimes had claimed to be
implementing nationalist versions of “socialism”, based to a greater or lesser extent on the East
European model. Even those on the left who were critical of their governments tended to accept and
identify with these claims. Thus in Algeria the left in the universities volunteered in the early 1970s
to go to the countryside to assist in the “land reform”, even though the regime had already repressed
the left student organisation and was maintaining police control over the universities. And in Egypt
the Communists continued to proclaim Nasser as a socialist, even after he had thrown them into
prison. So disillusionment with the regime became also, for many people, disillusionment with the
left.
On the other hand, there was the emergence of certain Islamic states as a political force – the seizure
of power by Gadaffi in Libya, the Saudi-led oil embargo against the West at the time of the Arab-
Israeli war of 1973, and then, most dramatically, the revolutionary establishment of the Iranian
Islamic Republic in 1979.
Islamism began to dominate among the very layers of students and young people who had once
looked to the left: in Algeria, for instance, “Khomeini began to be regarded by layers of young
people as Mao and Guevara once had been”. [56] Support for the Islamist movements went from
strength to strength as they seemed to offer immanent and radical change. The leaders of the
Islamist movements were triumphant.
Yet the contradictions in Islamism did not go away, and expressed themselves forcefully in the
decade that followed. Far from being an unstoppable force, Islamism has, in fact, been subject to its
own internal pressures which, repeatedly, have made its followers turn on one another. Just as the
history of Stalinism in the Middle East in the 1940s and 1950s was one of failure, betrayals, splits
and repression, so has the history of Islamism been in the 1980s and 1990s.

Notes
50. For an account of this period see, for example, A. Dabat and L. Lorenzano, Conflicto
Malvinense y Crisis Nacional (Mexico, 1982), pp.46-8.
51. M. Al-Ahnaf, B. Botivewau and F. Fregosi, op. cit., p.34.
52. Phil Marshall’s otherwise useful article, Islamic Fundamentalism – Oppression and Revolution,
in International Socialism 40, falls down precisely because it fails to distinguish between the anti-
imperialism of bourgeois movements faced with colonialism and that of petty bourgeois movements
facing independent capitalist states integrated into the world system. All his stress is on the role
these movements can play as they “express the struggle against imperialism”. This is to forget that
the local state and the local bourgeoisie are usually the immediate agent of exploitation and
oppression in the Third World today-something which some strands of radical Islamism do at least
half recognise (as when Qutb describes states like Egypt as “non-Islamic”).
It also fails to see that the petty bourgeoisie limitations of Islamist movements mean that their
leaders, like those of movements like Peronism before them, often use rhetoric about “imperialism”
to justify an eventual deal with the local state and ruling class while deflecting bitterness into
attacks on those minorities they identify as local agents of “cultural imperialism”. Marshall is
therefore mistaken to argue that revolutionary Marxists can follow the same approach to Islamism
as that developed by the early, pre-Stalinist Comintern in relation to the rising anti-colonial
movements of the early 1920s. We must certainly learn from the early Comintern that you can he on
the same side as a certain movement (or even state) in so far as it fights imperialism, while at the
same time you strive to overthrow its leadership and disagree with its politics, its strategy and its
tactics. But that is not at all the same as saying that the bourgeois and petty bourgeois Islamism of
the 1990s is the same as the bourgeois and petty bourgeois anti-colonialism of the 1920s.
Otherwise we can fall into the same mistake the left in countries like Argentina did during the late
1960s and early 1970s, when they supported the nationalism of their own bourgeoisie on the
grounds that they lived in “semi-colonial states”.
As A. Dabat and L. Lorenzano have quite rightly noted, “The Argentine nationalist and Marxist left
confused ... the association (of their own rulers) with the interests of the imperialist bourgeoisie and
their diplomatic servility in the face of the US army and state with political dependency (‘semi-
colonialism’, ‘colonialism’), which led to its most radical and determined forces to decide to call for
an amid struggle for ‘the second independence’. In reality, they were faced with something quite
different. The behaviour of any government of a relatively weak capitalist country (however
independent its state structure is) is necessary ‘conciliatory’, ‘capitulationist’ when it comes to
meeting its own interests ... in getting concessions from imperialist governments or firms ... or
consolidating alliances ... with these states. These types of action are in essence the same for all
bourgeois governments, however nationalist they consider themselves. This does not affect the
structure of the state and its relationship with the process of self-expansion and reproduction of
capital on the national scale (the character of the state as a direct expression of the national
dominant classes and not as an expression of the imperialist states and bourgeoisies of other
countries).” Conflicto Malvinense y Crisis Nacional, op. cit., p.70.
53. E. Abrahamian, Khomeinism, op. cit., p.3.
54. Ibid., p.17.
55. O. Roy, op. cit., p.71.
56. M. Al-Ahnaf, B. Botivewau and F. Fregosi, op. cit., pp.26-27.

The contradictions of Islamism: Egypt

The contradictory character of Islamism expresses itself in the way in which it sees “the return to
the Koran” taking place. It can see this as through a reform of the “values” of existing society,
meaning simply a return to religious practices, while leaving the main structures of society intact.
Or it can be seen as meaning a revolutionary overthrow of existing society. The contradiction is to
be seen in the history both of the old Islamic Brotherhood of Egypt in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s,
and in the new radical Islamist movements of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.
The Muslim Brotherhood grew rapidly in the 1930s and 1940s as it picked up support from those
disillusioned by the compromises the bourgeois nationalist Wafd made with the British, as we have
seen. It was further aided by the gyrations of the Communist left under Stalin’s influence, which
went so far as to support the establishment of Israel. By recruiting volunteers to fight in Palestine
and against the British occupation of the Egyptian Canal Zone, the Brotherhood could seem to
support the anti-imperialist struggle. But just as the Brotherhood reached its peak of support, it
began to run into troubles. Its leadership based themselves on a coalition of forces – recruitment of
a mass of petty bourgeois youth, links with the palace, deals with the right wing of the Wafd, plots
with junior armed forces officers – which were themselves moving in different directions.
As strikes, demonstrations, assassinations, military defeat in Palestine, and guerrilla warfare in the
Canal Zone tore Egyptian society apart, so the Brotherhood itself was in danger of disintegrating.
Many members were indignant at the personal behaviour of the general secretary, Banna’s brother
in law Abadin. Banna himself condemned members of the Brotherhood who assassinated the
premier Nuqrashi. After Banna’s death in 1949 his successor as “supreme guide” was dismayed to
discover the existence of a secret terrorist section. The seizure of power by the military under
Nasser in 1952-4 produced a fundamental divide between those who supported the coup and those
who opposed it until finally rival groups within the Brotherhood ended up physically battling for
control of its offices. [57] “An all-important loss of confidence in the leadership” enabled Nasser
eventually to crush what had once been a massively powerful organisation. [58]
But the loss of confidence was not an accident. It followed from the unbridgeable divisions which
were bound to arise in a petty bourgeois movement as the crisis in society deepened. On the one
hand, there were those who were drawn to the notion of using the crisis to force the old ruling class
to do a deal with them to enforce “Islamic values” (Banna himself dreamt of being involved with
the monarchy in establishing a “new Caliphate” and on one occasion gave backing to a government
in return for it promising to clamp down on alcohol consumption and prostitution [59]); on the
other, there were the radical petty bourgeois recruits wanting real social change, but only able to
conceive of getting it through immediate armed struggle.
The same contradictions run right through Islamism in Egypt today. The reconstituted Muslim
Brotherhood began operating semi-legally around the magazine al-Dawa in the late 1960s, turning
its back on any notion of overthrowing the Egyptian regime. Instead it set its goal as reform of
Egyptian society along Islamic lines by pressure from within. The task, as the supreme guide of the
Brotherhood had put it in a book written from prison, was to be “preachers, not judges”. [60] This
meant, in practice, adopting a “reformist Islamist” orientation, seeking an accommodation with the
Sadat regime. [61] In return the regime used the Islamists to deal with those it regarded, at the time,
as its main enemies – the left: “The regime treated the reformist wing of the Islamist movements –
grouped around the monthly magazine al-Dawa and on the university campuses by the Islamic
Associations – with benevolence, as the Islamicists purged the universities of anything that smelled
of Nasserism or Communism”. [62]
Egypt was shaken by a wave of strikes, demonstrations and riots in all its 13 main cities in January
1977, in response to the state putting up the price of bread and other main consumption items. This
was the largest uprising in the country since the 1919 nationalist revolt against the British. Both the
Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic Associations condemned the rising and sent messages of
support to the state against what they called a “Communist conspiracy”.
For such Islamist “reformism” what matters is changing the morals of society, rather than changing
society itself. The stress is not on the reconstitution of the Islamic community (umma) by a
transformation of society, but on enforcing certain sorts of behaviour within existing society. And
the enemy is not the state or the internal “oppressors”, but external forces seen as undermining
religious observance – in the case of al-Dawa “Jewry”, “the crusade” (meaning Christians,
including the Copts), “communism” and “secularism”. The fight to deal with these involves a
struggle to impose the sharia (the legal system codified by Islamic jurists from the Koran and the
Islamic tradition). It is a battle to get the existing state to impose a certain sort of culture on society,
rather than a battle to overthrow the state.
Such a perspective accords neatly with the desires of the traditional social groups who back a
certain version of Islamism (the remnants of the old landowning class, merchants), with those who
were once radical young Islamists but who have now made good (those who made money in Saudi
Arabia or who have risen to comfortable positions in the middle class professions) and to those
radical Islamists who have lost heart in radical social change when faced with state repression.
But it does not fit at all with the frustrated aspirations of the mass of the impoverished students and
ex-students, or with the mass of ex-peasants who they mix with in the poorer parts of the cities.
They are easily drawn to much more radical interpretations of what the “return to the Koran” means
– interpretations which attack not just extraneous influences in the existing Islamic states, but those
states themselves.
Thus a basic text for the Islamists in Egypt is the book Signposts, written by one of the Muslim
Brothers hanged by Nasser in 1966, Sayyid Qutb. This does not merely denounce the bankruptcies
of the Western and Stalinist ideologies, but also insists that a state can call itself Islamic and still be
based on anti-Islamic barbarism (jahiliyya, the name given by Muslims to the pre-Islamic society in
Arabia). [63]
Such a state of affairs can only be rectified by “a vanguard of the umma” which carries through a
revolution by following the example of the “first Koranic generation” [64] – that is, which
withdraws from existing society as Mohammed did when he left Mecca in order to build up a force
capable of overthrowing it.
Such arguments went beyond seeing the only enemy as imperialism, and instead, for the first time,
attacked the local state directly. They were very embarrassing for the moderates of the neo-Muslim
Brotherhood, who are supposed to revere their author as a martyr. But they have inspired many
thousands of young radicals. Thus in the mid-1970s one group, al Taktir Wal Higra, whose leader,
Shukri Mustafa, was executed for kidnapping a high religious functionary in 1977, rejected as “non-
Islamic” existing society, the existing mosques, the existing religious leaders and even the neo-
Muslim Brotherhood associated with Dawa. [65] Its attitude was that its members alone were
genuine Muslims and that they had to break with existing society, living as communities apart and
treating everyone else as infidels.
At first the Islamic Associations in the universities were very much under the influence of the
moderate Muslim Brotherhood, not only condemning the uprising against the price increases but
even disavowing Shukri when he was hanged later in the year. But their attitudes began to shift,
particularly when Sadat began the “peace process” with Israel late in 1977. Soon many of the
university activists were embracing ideas in some ways more radical than Shukri’s: not only did
they turn aside from existing society, they began organising to overthrow it, as with the
assassination of Sadat by Abd al-Salam Faraj’s Jihad group in October 1981.
Faraj spelt out his harsh criticisms of the strategies of different parts of Islamic movement – those
sections who restricted themselves to working for Islamic charities, those (the neo-Muslim
Brotherhood) who try to create an Islamic party which can only give legitimacy to the existing state,
those who base themselves on “preaching” and so avoid jihad, those who advocate withdrawal from
society on the lines of Shukri’s group, and those who saw the priority as fighting against the
external enemies of Islam (in Palestine or Afghanistan). Against all of them, he insisted immediate
armed struggle, “jihad against the iniquitous prince”, was the duty of all Muslims:
The fight against the enemy at home takes priority over the fight against the enemy abroad ... The
responsibility for the existence of colonialism or imperialism in our Muslim countries lies with
these infidel governments. To launch a struggle against imperialism is therefore useless and
inglorious, a waste of time. [66]
Faraj’s argument led straight to a perspective of insurrection against the state. But this did not stop
there being significant differences within his own group between the Cairo section, built round the
prime objective of destroying the infidel state, and the other section in the middle Egyptian city of
Asyut, who “considered Christian proselytism the main obstacle to the propagation of Islam”. [67]
In practice this meant the Asyut group directed most of its fire against the Coptic minority (mostly
poor peasants) – a policy which had already been followed with horrific success by the jamaa
students earlier in the year, when it ignited murderous inter-communal fighting first in the middle
Egypt town of Minya and then in the Cairo neighbourhood of Al-Zawiyya al-Hamra: “The jamaa
did not hesitate to fan the flames of sectarian tension in order to place the state in an awkward
position and to demonstrate they were prepared to supplant the state, step by step, so to speak.” [68]
The Asyut section of jihad was, then, following a tried and proven method of gaining local popular
support through a strategy of encouraging communal hatreds. This enabled it briefly to seize control
of Asyut in the aftermath of the assassination of Sadat. By contrast, the Cairo activists, with their
stress on the state as the enemy, “enjoyed no networks of complicity or sustenance, and their
isolated act – the assassination of Sadat – was not followed by the uprising of the Muslim
population of Cairo so ardently sought by Faraj and his friends”. [69]
Instead of the assassination leading to the Islamists being able to seize state power, the state was
able to take advantage of the confusion created by the assassination to crush the Islamists. As
thousands were arrested and many leaders executed, repression significantly weakened the
movement. However, the causes which had led so many young people to turn to the Islamists did
not disappear. By the end of the 1980s the movement had regained confidence and was starting to
grow rapidly in some quarters of Cairo and Alexandria. This was coupled with an effective terrorist
campaign against the police and the security forces.
Then in December 1992 the state launched a new and unprecedented campaign of repression. Slum
areas in Cairo, such as Imbaba, were occupied by 20,000 troops with tanks and armoured cars. Tens
of thousands were arrested and death squads set out to kill those activists who escaped. The main
mosques used by the radical Islamists were blocked with concrete. Parents, children and wives of
activists were arrested and tortured.
Again as in the early 1980s the campaign of state terror was successful. The Islamist movement was
not able to, and did not even try to, mobilise support in the form of demonstrations. Instead, it
moved to a totally terrorist strategy which did not seriously shake the Mubarak regime, even if it did
virtually destroy the tourist industry.
Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood has continued to behave like a loyal opposition, negotiating
with the regime over the gradual introduction of the sharia into the state legal code and holding
back from protests at the repression.

Notes
57. R.P. Mitchell, op. cit., p.145.
58. Ibid., p.116.
59. Ibid., p.40.
60. Book by Hudaybi, quoted in G. Kepel, op. cit., p.61.
61. Ibid., p.71.
62. Ibid.
63. See quote in Ibid., p.44.
64. Ibid., p.53.
65. For details, see ibid., p.78.
66. For a long account of Faraj’s views in his book, The Hidden Imperative, see ibid., pp.193-202.
67. Ibid., p.208.
68. Ibid., p.164.
69. Ibid., p.210.

The contradictions of Islamism: Algeria

The story of the rise and radicalisation of Islamism in Algeria is similar in many ways to that in
Egypt. The Algerian dictator of the late 1960s and 1970, Boumediénne, encouraged moderate
Islamism as a counterbalance to the left and to his historic opponents within the liberation
movement that had ended French colonialism.
In 1970 the state initiated an Islamisation campaign under Mouloud Kassim, minister of education
and religion, which denounced the “degradation of morals” and “Western influences” behind
“cosmopolitanism, alcoholism, the snobbism that consists in always following the West and
dressing half naked”. [70] The Islamicists were able to climb on this bandwagon to increase their
own influence, getting money from landowners worried about the agrarian reform to propagate a
message which could appeal to the most impoverished layers in society:
The theme of the integrists’ propaganda was that Islam was menaced by atheistic and communist
intrusion of which the agrarian reform was the bearer ... The integrists ... spread their own ideas in
the most unfavoured neighbourhoods, after building improvised mosques which were later made
into solid constructions. Untouched by the agrarian revolution, workers and unemployed,
discontented by their conditions, listened to the integrists. [71]
Then in the mid-1970s they got support from sections of the regime to undermine the left in the
colleges: “Between 1976 and 1980 the integrists succeeded, with the connivance of the regime, in
reducing to nothing the influence of the Marxists”. [72]
In the early 1980s a section of the regime continued to look towards the more “moderate” versions
of Islamism to bolster itself. The minister of religious affairs until 1986, Chibane, hoped to build
such an Islamist tendency, and to this end helped the Islamists to get money for building mosques
from industrialists and commercial interests. [73] But this could not stop the development of radical
interpretations of Islam which rejected the regime. Thus in the city of Constantine, one study tells:
Integrism replaces among large sections of Constantine opinion the traditional conceptions by the
popularity of a new Islamic vision standing for a resurgence of the Community of the Prophet. This
integrism gets its strength from the social frustrations which afflict a large part of the youth, those
left out of account by the social and economic system. [74]
The strength of this interpretation of Islam was such as to be able to force the ministry of religious
instruction to employ its people as imams (preachers) in the mosques rather than those who
accepted “moderate” views.
The regime was losing control of the very mechanism it had encouraged to deal with the left.
Instead of controlling the masses for the regime, Islamism was providing a focus for all their
bitterness and hatred against those leaders who harked back to the liberation struggle of the 1960s
but who had grown into a comfortable ruling class. The economic crisis which hit Algerian society
in the mid-1980s deepened the bitterness – just as the ruling class turned back to the Western
capitalists it had once denounced in an effort to come to terms with the crisis. And the Islamist
agitation against those who spoke French and were “corrupted by Western morals” could easily
become an attack on the interests of “the small but influential stratum of highly educated
technocrats who constitute the core of a new salaried and bureaucratised class”. [75]
The regime began to turn against the Islamists imprisoning certain of their leaders in the mid-1980s,
with the regime’s head, Chadli, accusing the imams of “political demagogy”. [76] The effect,
however, was not to destroy the Islamists, but to increase their standing as the opposition to the
regime.
This became clear in October 1988. All the bitterness against the ruling class and the regime
exploded in upheaval very similar to that which was to take place in Eastern Europe a year later.
The movement, beginning as a series of spontaneous strikes in the Algiers area, soon turned into
massive street clashes between young people and the police: “The people, like a freed prisoner,
rediscovered their own voices and their sense of liberty. Even the power of the police no longer
frightened them.” [77] “The insurrection of October 1988 was above all a revolt of young people
against their conditions of life after a quarter of a century of military dictatorship.” [78]
The revolt shook the regime to its core. As in Eastern Europe all sorts of political forces that had
been repressed now came out into the open. Journalists wrote freely for the first time, intellectuals
began to speak openly about the real condition of Algerian society, exiled politicians of both left
and right returned from abroad, a women’s movement emerged to challenge the regime’s Islamic
family law, which gave women fewer rights than men. But it soon became clear that outside the
Berber speaking areas the Islamists were the hegemonic force among the opposition. Their
influence was in many ways like that of the “democrats” in Eastern Europe and the USSR in the
following year. The tolerance shown to them by sections of the regime in the past, and the support
they continued to get from some powerful foreign states (for instance, finance from Saudi Arabia)
combined with their ability to articulate a message that focused the bitterness of the mass of the
population:
By their number, their network of mosques, and their tendency to act spontaneously as a single man,
as if obeying the orders of a secret central committee, the Islamists appeared as the only movement
capable of mobilising the masses and influencing the course of events. It was they who would come
forward as the spokesmen of the insurgents, able to impose themselves as future leaders of the
movement ... Not knowing who to talk to, after quietening its machine guns, the regime was looking
for “leaders”, representatives capable of formulating demands and controlling a crowd as violent as
they were uncontrollable. So Chadli received Madani, Belhadj, and Nahnah [the best known
Islamist figures]. [79]
So influential did the Islamist movement, now organised as the FIS, become in the months that
followed that it was able to win control of the most important municipalities in the June 1990 local
elections and then the biggest share of the votes in the general elections of December 1991, despite
being subject to severe repression. The Algerian military annulled the elections in order to stop the
Islamists forming a government. But this did not stop the massive support for the Islamists creating
near civil war conditions in the country, with whole areas falling under effective control of Islamist
armed groups.
Yet the rise of Islamist influence was accompanied by growing confusion as to what the FIS stood
for. While it was in control of the country’s major municipalities between June 1990 and May 1991,
the changes it brought about were modest: the closing of bars, the cancellation of musical
spectacles, campaigns, at times violent, for “feminine decency” and against the ubiquitous satellite
dishes that “permitted reception of Western pornography” ... Neither Madani [the FIS’s best known
leader] nor its consultative assembly drew up a true politico-social programme or convened a
congress to discuss it. Madani limited himself to saying that this would meet after they had formed
a government. [80]
What the FIS did do was show opposition to the demands of workers for improved wages. In these
months it opposed a dust workers’ strike in Algiers, a civil servants strike and a one day general
strike called by the former “official” union federation. Madani justified breaking the dust workers’
strike in a newspaper interview, complaining that it was forcing respectable people like doctors and
professional engineers to sweep up:
The dustmen have the right to strike, but not the right to invade our capital and turn our country into
a dustbin. There are strikes of trade unions that have become terrains for action by the corrupters,
the enemies of Allah and the fatherland, communists and others, who are spreading everywhere
because the cadre of the FLN have retreated ... We are reliving the days of the OAS. [81]
Such a respectable stance fitted neatly with the interests of the classes who had financed the
Islamists from the time of the land reform onwards. It also suited those successful members of the
petty bourgeoisie who were part of the FIS – the professors, the established imams and the grammar
school teachers. And it appealed to those in the countryside whose adhesion to the former ruling
party, the FLN, had enabled them to prosper, becoming successful capitalist farmers or small
businessmen. But it was not enough either to satisfy the impoverished urban masses who looked to
the FIS for their salvation or to force the ruling class and the military to sit back and accept an FIS
government.
At the end of May 1991, faced with threats by the military to sabotage the electoral process rather
than risk a FIS victory, the FIS leaders turned round and “launched an authentic insurrection which
recalled October 1988: molotov cocktails, tear gas, barricades. Ali Belhadj, the charismatic Imam,
launched tens of thousands of demonstrators on to the streets. [82] For a time the FIS took control
of the centre of Algiers, supported by vast numbers of young people to whom Islam and the jihad
seemed the only alternative to the misery of the society the military were defending.
In reality, the more powerful the FIS became, the more it was caught between respectability and
insurrectionism, telling the masses they could not strike in March 1991 and then calling on them to
overthrow the state two months later in May.
The same contradictions have emerged within the Islamist movement in the three years since, as
guerrilla warfare has grown in intensity in both the cities and the countryside. “The condemnation
of Abasi Madani and Ali Belhadj to 12 years in prison ... provoked a major radicalisation of the FIS
and a fragmentation of its rank and file. The detention of thousands of members and sympathisers in
camps in the Sahara spread urban terrorism and rural guerrilla warfare”. [83] Two armed
organisations emerged, the Armed Islamic Movement (MIA, recently renamed AIS) and the Armed
Islamic Groups (GIA), which were soon getting the support of armed bands right across the country.
But the underground movements were characterised by “internal dissension”: [84]
As against the presumed “moderation” of the MIA, which “only” executes the representatives of the
“impious regime”, the GIA opposes an extreme jihad, whose chosen victims are journalists, writers,
poets, feminists and intellectuals ... since November 1993 killing 32 moderate Islamic imams and
unveiled women ...
Fratricidal fights between the MIA and the GIA have led to dozens of casualties ... the deaths of
seven terrorists are imputed to these quarrels by some people, but to the death squads of the police
by others ... [85] The GIA accuses the historical leaders of the FIS of opportunism, treachery and
abandoning their programme of the complete application of the Sharia. [86]

Notes
70. A. Rouadia, op. cit., p.20.
71. Ibid., pp.33-4.
72. Ibid., p.36.
73. Ibid., p.144.
74. Ibid., p.145-146.
75. J.P. Entelis, op. cit., p.74.
76. A. Rouadia, op. cit., p.191.
77. Ibid., p.209.
78. M. Al-Ahnaf, B. Botivewau and F. Fregosi, op. cit., p.30.
79. Ibid.
80. J. Goytisolo, Argelia en el Vendava, in El Pais, 30 March, 1994.
81. El Salaam, 21 June 1990, translated in M. AI-Ahnaf, B. Botivewau and F. Fregosi, op. cit.,
pp.200-202.
82. See the account of these events in J. Goytisolo, op. cit., 29 March 1994. This is now the course
recommended by the British big business daily, the Financial Times (see the issue of 19 July 1994)
and apparently by the US government.
83. J. Goytisolo, op. cit., 30 March 1994.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid., 3 April 1994.

Splitting two ways

The experience of Islamism in Egypt and Algeria shows how it can split over two different
questions: first over whether to follow the course of more or less peaceful reform of the existing
society or to take up arms; second over whether to fight to change the state or to purge society of
“impiety”.
In Egypt the present day Muslim Brotherhood is based on a policy of reform directed at the state. It
attempts to work within existing society building up its strength so as to become a legal opposition,
with MPs, a press of its own, control over various middle class professional organisations and
influence over wider sections of the population through the mosques and the Islamic charities. It
also tends to stress the fight to impose Islamic piety through campaigning for the existing regime to
incorporate the sharia into the legal code.
This is a strategy which also seems to appeal to a section of the imprisoned or exiled leadership of
the FIS in Algeria. In the first few months of 1994 there were reports of negotiations between them
and a section of the regime, with a perspective of sharing power and implementing part of the
sharia. Thus the Guardian could report in April 1994 that Rabah Kebir, an exiled leader of FIS,
welcomed the appointment of a new prime minster for Algeria, the “technocrat”, Redha Malek, as
“a positive act” [87] – only two days after the FIS had denounced the latest package agreed between
that government and the IMF. [88]
Some perceptive commentators see such a deal as providing the best way for the Algerian
bourgeoisie to end the instability and preserve its position. Thus Juan Goytisolo argues that the
military could have saved itself a lot of trouble by allowing the FIS to form a government after the
1991 elections:
The conditions in which it acceded to power would have limited in a very effective way the
application of its programme. The indebtedness of Algeria, its financial dependence on its European
and Japanese creditor, the economic chaos and the hostile reservations of the Armed Forces would
have constituted a difficult obstacle for a FIS government to overcome ... Its inability to fulfil its
electoral promises were fully predictable. With a year of a government so tightly constrained by its
enemies, the FIS would have lost a good part of its credibility. [89]
“Islamist reformism” fits the needs of certain major social groups – the traditional landowners and
merchants, the new Islamic bourgeoisie (like those of the Muslim Brotherhood who made millions
in Saudi Arabia) and that section of the Islamic new middle class who have enjoyed upward
mobility. But it does not satisfy the other layers who have looked to Islamism – the students and
impoverished ex-students, or the urban poor. The more the Muslim Brotherhood or the FIS look to
compromise, the more these layers look elsewhere, seeing any watering down of the demand for the
installation of Islam of the Koranic years as betrayal.
But their reaction to this can be in different directions. It can remain passive in the face of the state,
urging a strategy of withdrawal from society, in which the stress is on preaching and purifying the
Islamic minority, rather than on confrontation. This was the original strategy of the Shukri group in
Egypt in the mid-1970s, and it is the approach of some of the radical preachers who are aware of the
power of the state today.
Or it can turn to armed struggle. But just as peaceful struggle can be directed against the state or
against impiety alone, so armed struggle can be armed struggle to overthrow the state, or armed
actions against “the enemies of Islam” among the population at large – the ethnic and religious
minorities, unveiled women, foreign films, the influence of “cultural imperialism” and so on. The
logic of the situation might seem to push people towards the option of armed struggle against the
state. But there is a powerful counter-logic at work, which is rooted in the class composition of the
Islamist following.
As we have seen, the sections of the exploiting classes which back Islamism are naturally drawn to
its more reformist versions. Even where they find little choice but to take up arms, they want to do
so in ways which minimise wider social unrest. They look to coups d’etat rather than mass action.
And if this erupts despite them, they seek to bring it to an end as quickly as possible.
The impoverished new petty bourgeoisie can move much further towards a perspective of armed
action. But its own marginal social position cuts it off from seeing this as developing out of mass
struggles like strikes. Instead it looks to conspiracies based on small armed groups – conspiracies
that do not lead to the revolutionary change their instigators want, even when, as with the
assassination of Sadat, they achieve their immediate goals. It can cause enormous disruption to
existing society but it cannot revolutionise it.
This was the experience of the populists in Russia before 1917. It was the experience of a
generation of students and ex-students right across the Third World who turned to Guevarism or
Maoism in the late 1960s (and whose successors still fight on in the Philippines and Peru). It is the
experience of armed anti-state Islamists in Egypt and Algeria today.
The only way out of this impasse would be for the Islamists to base themselves on the non-marginal
groups among the urban poor today – among the workers in medium and large scale industry. But
the basic notions of Islamism make this all but impossible since Islam, in even its most radical
form, preaches the return to a community (umma) which reconciles the rich and the poor, not an
overthrow of the rich. Thus the economic programme of the FIS puts forward as an alleged
alternative to “Western capitalism” a blueprint for “small business” producing for “local needs”
which is virtually indistinguishable from the electoral propaganda of innumerable conservative and
liberal parties right across the world. [90] And its attempt to create “Islamic unions” in the summer
of 1990 laid stress on the “duties of workers”, because, it was claimed, the old regime gave them
too many rights and “accustomed the workers to not working”. The class struggle, it insisted. “does
not exist in Islam”, for the sacred texts do not speak of it. What is needed is for the employer to
treat his workers in the same way the Koran tells the faithful to treat their domestic slaves – as
“brothers”. [91]
It is not surprising that nowhere have any of the Islamist groups ever succeeded in building a base
in the factories even one tenth as strong as they built up in the neighbourhoods. But without such a
base they cannot on their own accord determine the direction of social change, even if they do
succeed in bringing about the collapse of an existing regime. Those on the margins of society can
occasionally provoke a great crisis within an already unstable regime. They cannot determine how
the crisis is resolved.
The Islamist groups may be able to provoke such a crisis in one of the existing regimes and so force
out its existing leaders. But that will not prevent an outcome in which the ruling class, which has
prospered beneath these leaders, does a deal with the less militant Islamists to hold on to power.
And short of such a crisis the militant Islamists themselves face an enormous toll of deaths at the
hands of the state.
It is this pressure from the state which encourages some of them to turn away from direct assault on
the regime to the easier task of assaulting the “impious” and the minorities – an approach which in
turn can bring them back closer to the mainstream “moderate” reformist Islamists.
There is, in fact, a certain dialectic at work within Islamism. Militant anti-state Islamists, after
bearing the brunt of unsuccessful armed struggle, learn the hard way to keep their heads down and
instead turn to fighting to impose Islamic behaviour either directly or through Islamic reformism.
But neither imposing the Islamic behaviour nor reforms can deal with the immense dissatisfaction
of the social layers that look to Islamism. And so new militants are continually arising who split off
to return to the path of armed action, until these too learn the hard way the limitations of armed
actions which are cut off from an active social base.
There is no automatic progression from seeing the limitations of Islamic reformism to moving to
revolutionary politics. Rather the limitations of reformism lead either to the terrorism and
guerrillaism of groups that try to act without a mass base, or in the direction of a reactionary attack
on scapegoats for the problems of the system. And because each of the approaches expresses itself
in the same religious language, there is often an overlap between one and the other. People who do
want to attack the regime and imperialism do attack the Copts, the Berbers and unveiled women.
People who have an instinctive hatred of the whole system do fall into the trap of wanting to
negotiate over the imposition of the sharia by the state. And where there are divisions between rival
groups – sometimes so bitter that they start killing each other as “apostates” (renegades from true
Islam) – the divisions are expressed in ways which obscure the real social causes behind them. If
one upwardly mobile Islamist abandons the struggle, that only proves that he personally is a “bad
Muslim” (or even an apostate); it does not in itself prevent another upwardly mobile Islamist from
being a “good Muslim”.

Notes
87. Guardian, 15 April 1994.
88. Guardian, 13 April 1994.
89. J. Goytisolo, op. cit., 29 March 1994.
90. See the translation on economic policy in M. Al-Ahnaf, B. Botivewau and F. Fregosi, op. cit.
91. Ibid., p.109.

The Iranian experience

The Islamic regime in Iran dominates discussions on Islamic revivalism, much as the record of
Stalinism dominates discussions on socialism. And often, even on the left, very similar conclusions
are drawn. The Islamists are seen, much as the Stalinists were once seen, as the most dangerous of
all political forces, able to impose a totalitarianism that will prevent any further progressive
development. In order to stop them it is necessary for the left to unite with the liberal section of the
bourgeoisie [92], or even to support non-democratic states in their repression of the Islamist groups.
[93] It is a view that overrates the cohesion of Islamism and ascribes to it an ability to dictate
historical events which in reality it does not have. And it rests on an erroneous understanding of the
role of Islam during and after the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
That revolution was not a product of Islamism, but of the enormous contradictions that arose in the
Shah’s regime in the mid to late 1970s. Economic crisis had heightened the deep divisions which
existed between sections of modern capital associated with the state and other, more “traditional”,
sections centred around the bazaar (which was responsible for two thirds of wholesale trade and
three quarters of retail trade) at the same time as deepening the discontent of the mass of the
workers and the vast numbers of recent ex-peasants who had flooded into the cities. Protests of
intellectuals and students were joined by the disaffected clergy and spread to involve the urban poor
in a series of great clashes with the police and army. A wave of strikes paralysed industry and
brought the all important oil fields to a standstill. And then early in February 1979 the left wing
guerrillas of the Fedayeen and the left-Islamist guerrillas of the People’s Mojahedin succeeded in
fomenting large scale mutinies in the armed forces, so bringing about a revolutionary collapse of the
old regime.
Much of the rising movement had identified with the exiled Islamist Ayatollah Khomeini. His name
had come to symbolise opposition to the monarchy, and his residence outside Paris had been the
point of contact between representatives of the different forces involved – the bazaaris and the
clergy who were close to them, the liberal bourgeois opposition, the professional associations, the
students and even the left guerrillas. On his return to Tehran in January 1979 he became the
symbolic leader of the revolution.
Yet at this stage he was far from controlling events, even though he had an acute sense of political
tactics. The key events that brought the Shah down – the spread of the strikes, the mutiny inside the
armed forces – occurred completely independently of him. And in the months after the revolution
Khomeini was no more able to impose a single authority over the revolutionary upheaval than
anyone else. In the cities various local committees (Komitehs) exercised de facto power. The
universities were in the hands of the left and the Mojahedin. In the factories shoras (factory
councils) fought for control with management, often forcing out those associated with the Shah’s
regime and taking over the organisation of production themselves. In the regions inhabited by
ethnic minorities – Kurdistan in the north west and Khuzistan in the Arab speaking south west –
movements began to fight for self determination. And at the top, overseeing this process, was not
one body but two. The provisional government was run by Bazargan, a “moderate” Islamist linked
to modern sections of the bourgeoisie (he had founded the Islamic students’ associations in the
1950s and then the Islamic Engineers Association). But next to it, acting as an alternative centre of
authority, was a revolutionary council nominated by Khomeini, around which coalesced a group of
clerics and Islamist intellectuals with links with the bazaars.
The group around Khomeini were eventually able to establish near total power for themselves and
their Islamic Republican Party (IRP). But it took them two and a half years of manoeuvring
between different social forces which could easily have overwhelmed them. For most of 1979 they
collaborated with Bazargan in an effort to clamp down on the shoras within the factories and the
separatist nationalist movements. They used Islamic language to mobilise behind them sections of
the lumpen proletariat into gangs, the Hizbollah, which would attack the left, enforce Islamic
“morality” (for instance, against women who refused to wear the veil) and join the army in putting
down the separatist revolts. There were instances of brutal repression (the execution of about a
hundred people for “sexual crimes”, homosexuality and adultery, the killing of some left wing
activists, the shooting down of protesters belonging to the national minorities), as in any attempt to
restore bourgeois “normality” after a great revolutionary upheaval. But the overall balance sheet for
the IRP was not very positive in the early autumn of 1979. On the one hand, those successes they
had enjoyed in checking the revolution had strengthened the position of the grouping around
Bazargan with whom they were increasingly at odds. As a study of Bazargan’s movement has put it:
One year after the fall of the Shah it was becoming clear that the better educated middle classes and
the political forces they were supporting [ie Bazargan] were rapidly expanding their influence,
being dominant in sensitive positions in the mass media, state organisations and especially
educational institutions ... With the disintegration of the unity of the Islamic forces, the Islamic
committees were not capable of having a large majority of the employees of the organisations
behind them. [94]
On the other, there was a growing ferment that threatened to escape from the Khomeiniites’ control,
leading to a massive growth of both the secular left and the Islamic left. The left was dominant
among the Students, despite the first wave of repression against it in August 1979. The shoras in the
factories had been weakened by this same repression, but many remained intact for another year
[95], and the workers’ willingness to struggle was certainly not destroyed – there were 360 “forms
of strikes, sit-ins and occupations” in 1979-80, 180 in 1980-1 and 82 in 1981-2. [96]
The IRP could only regain control itself by making a radical shift in November 1979 – organising
the minority of students who followed its banner rather than that of the Fedayeen or People’s
Mojahedin to seize the US embassy and hold its staff hostage, provoking a major confrontation with
the world’s most important imperialist power. Another study of this period says: “The
fundamentalist student of the ‘Islamic Associations’ who a few weeks earlier had been looked on by
their rivals as reactionaries and fanatics, were now posing as super-revolutionaries and were
cheered by masses of people whenever they appeared at the gate of the Embassy to be interviewed
by reporters.” [97]
The shift to an apparently radical anti-imperialist stance was accompanied by radicalisation of the
IRP’s policies in the workplaces. From defending many of the old managers it moved to agitating
for their removal – although not for their power to be taken over by the factory councils, but by
“Islamic managers” who would collaborate with Islamic councils from which the left and the
Mojahedin were automatically excluded as “infidels”.
This radical turn gave new popularity to the IRP It seemed to be putting into effect the anti-
imperialism which the group around Bazargan had propagated during their long years of opposition
to the Shah but which they were now abandoning as they sought to cement a new relationship
between Iran and the US. It was also acting in accord with some of the main and most popular
slogans raised in the months since the revolution by the growing forces of both the secular and the
Islamic left:
The taking over of the American Embassy helped the fundamentalists to overcome some of their
difficulties ... The outcome helped those groups that advocated the sovereignty of the clergymen to
implement their polices and take over the sensitive organisations that were manned and controlled
by the better educated middle class. When the students who were loyal to the clergymen invaded the
gates of the US embassy, those who had been identified as “reactionaries” re-emerged as the leading
revolutionaries, capable of dumping the modernist and secularist forces altogether ... It was the
beginning of a new coalition in which certain clergy and their bazaari associates were the leaders
and large groups from the lower middle class and the urban lower class were the functionaries. [98]
The group around Khomeini was not just gaining in popularity, it was also creating a much wider
base for itself as it displaced, or at least threatened to displace, the old “non-Islamic” managers and
functionaries. In industry, the media, the armed forces, the police, a new layer of people began to
exercise control whose careers depended on their ability to agitate for Khomeini’s version of
Islamism. And those who remained from the old hierarchies of power rushed to prove their own
Islamic credentials by implementing the IRP line.
What the group around Khomeini succeeded in doing was to unite behind it a wide section of the
middle class – both the traditional petty bourgeoisie based in the bazaar and many of the first
generation of the new middle class – in a struggle to control the hierarchies of power. The secret of
its success was its ability to enable those who followed it at every level of society to combine
religious enthusiasm with personal advance. Someone who had been an assistant manager in a
foreign owned company could now run it under state control and feel he was fulfilling his religious
duty to serve the community (umma); someone who had lived in deep poverty among the lumpen
proletariat could now achieve both material security and a sense of self achievement by leading a
hizbollah gang in its attempts to purify society of “indecency” and the “infidel Communists”.
The opportunities open to those who opted for the Khomeini line were enormous. The flight from
the country of local and foreign managers and technicians during the early months of revolutionary
upheaval had created 130,000 positions to be filled. [99] The purging of “non-Islamic” managers,
functionaries and army officers added enormously to the total.
The interesting thing about the method by which the group around Khomeini ousted their opponents
and established a one party regime was that there was nothing specifically Islamist about it. It was
not, as many people horrified by the religious intolerance of the regime contend, a result of some
“irrational” or “medieval” characteristic of “Islamic fundamentalism”. In fact, it was very similar to
that carried through in different parts of the world by parties based on sections of the petty
bourgeoisie. It was the method used, for instance, by the weak Communist Parties of much of
Eastern Europe to establish their control after 1945. [100] And a prototype for the petty bourgeois
who combines ideological fervour and personal advance is to be found in Balzac’s Pére Goriot – the
austere Jacobin who makes his fortune out of exploiting the shortages created by the revolutionary
upheaval.
A political party based on organising a section of the petty bourgeoisie around the struggle for
positions cannot take power in just any circumstances. Most such attempts come to nothing,
because the petty bourgeois formations are too weak to challenge the power of the old ruling class
without a mobilisation of the mass of society which they then cannot control. Thus in the
Portuguese Revolution of 1974-5 the Communist Party’s attempts to infiltrate the hierarchies of
power fell apart in the face of a resistance co-ordinated by the major Western capitalist powers on
the one hand and of an upsurge of workers’ militancy from below on the other. Such attempts can
only work if, for specific historical reasons, the major social classes are paralysed.
As Tony Cliff put it in a major piece of Marxist analysis, if the old ruling class is too weak to hang
on to power in the face of economic crisis and insurgency from below, while the working class does
not have the independent organisation to allow it to become the head of the movement, then
sections of the intelligentsia are able to make a bid for power, feeling that they have a mission to
solve the problems of society as a whole:
The intelligentsia is sensitive to their countries’ technical lag. Participating as it does in the
scientific and technical world of the 20th century, it is stifled by the backwardness of its own nation.
This feeling is accentuated by the “intellectual unemployment” endemic in these countries. Given
the general economic backwardness, the only hope for most students is a government job, but there
are not nearly enough of these to go round.
The spiritual life of the intellectuals is also in a crisis. In a crumbling order where the traditional
pattern is disintegrating, they feel insecure, rootless, lacking infirm values.
Dissolving cultures give rise to a powerful urge for a new integration that must be total and
dynamic if it is to fill the social and spiritual vacuum, that must combine religious fervour with
militant nationalism. They are in search for a dynamic movement which will unify the nation and
open up broad vistas for it, but at the same time will give themselves power ...
They hope for reform from above and would dearly love to hand the new world over to a grateful
people, rather- than see the liberating struggle of a self conscious and freely associated people result
in a new world for themselves. They care a lot for measures to drag their nation out of stagnation,
but very little for democracy ... All this makes totalitarian state capitalism a very attractive goal for
intellectuals. [101]
Although these words were written about the attraction of Stalinism, Maoism and Castroism in
Third World countries, they fit absolutely the Islamist intelligentsia around Khomeini in Iran. They
were not, as many left wing commentators have mistakenly believed, merely an expression of
“backward”, bazaar-based traditional, “parasitic”, “merchant capital”. [102] Nor were they simply
an expression of classic bourgeois counter-revolution. [103] They undertook a revolutionary
reorganisation of ownership and control of capital within Iran even while leaving capitalist relations
of production intact, putting large scale capital that had been owned by the group around the Shah
into the hands of state and parastate bodies controlled by themselves – in the interests of the
“oppressed”, of course, with the corporation that took over the Shah’s own economic empire being
named the Mustafazin (“Oppressed”) Foundation. As Bayat tells:
The seizure of power by the clergy was a reflection of a power vacuum in the post-revolutionary
state. Neither the proletariat nor- the bourgeoisie was able to exert their political hegemony. The
reason for their inability must be sought in their historical development which is a testimony to the
weakness of both. [104]
Or, as Cliff put it of the intelligentsia in Third World countries: “Their power is in direct relation to
the feebleness of other classes and their political nullity”. [105]
It was because they depended on balancing between the major social classes to advance their own
control over the state and a section of capital that the Khomeini group had to hit first at the left
organisation and then at the established bourgeois organisations (Bazargan etc) before being able to
consolidate their own power. In 1979 this meant working with Bazargan against the left to subdue
the revolutionary wave, and then making certain gestures to the left at the time of the seizure of the
US Embassy to isolate the established bourgeoisie. During the 1980s it meant another zigzag,
allowing another Islamic figure linked to the established bourgeoisie, Bani Sadr, to take the
presidency and then working with him to smash the bastion of the left, the universities. When the
IRP suggested sending the Islamic gangs, the Hizbollah, into the universities to purge them of “anti-
Islamic elements”, Bani Sadr was happy to comply:
Both the IRP leaders and the liberals agreed to the idea of cultural revolution through direct action
by the people who were mobilised to march on university campuses ... For the liberals it was a
means to get rid of the leftist agitators in the public institutions, the factories and the rural areas, so
that economic and political stability could be restored to the country ...
The gangs of the Hizbollah invaded the universities, injured and killed members of the political
groups who were resisting the cultural revolution, and burned books and papers thought to be “un-
Islamic”. The government closed all universities and colleges for three years, during which
university curricula were rewritten. [106]
Yet even at this time the Khomeiniites continued to preserve part of their own “left” image, using
anti-imperialist language to justify what they were doing. They insisted the fight to impose “Islamic
values” was essential in the struggle against “cultural imperialism”, and that, because the left
resisted this, it was in reality working for imperialism.
External events helped them to get away with these arguments. These were the months of the
abortive US attempt to recapture the embassy by sending in armed helicopters (which crashed into
each other in the desert), of Shiite demonstrations against the government of Bahrin, of pro-
Khomeini riots in the oil rich Saudi province of Hasa, of the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca
by armed Sunni Islamists, and of the attempt by Saddam Hussein of Iraq to ingratiate himself with
the US and the Arab Gulf sheikdoms by launching an invasion of Iran. The Khomeiniites could
proclaim, rightly, that the revolution was under attack from forces allied to imperialism, and,
wrongly, that they alone could defend it. No wonder Khomeini himself referred to the attack as a
“godsend”. The need for all out mobilisation against the invading forces in the winter of 1980-1
allowed his supporters to justify increasing their control, at the expense of both the left and the Bani
Sadr group, until in June-July 1981 they were able to crush both, establishing a near totalitarian
structure.
But why were the left not able to deal with the advance of the IRP? In retrospect, it is often argued
that the fault lies with the failure of the left to understand in time the need for an alliance with the
“progressive”, “liberal”, bourgeoisie. This is Halliday’s argument. [107] But, as we have seen, the
liberal bourgeoisie under Bazargan and then Bani Sadr were united with Khomeini in the campaign
against the shoras in the factories and the campaign to purge the universities. What divided them
was who was going to get the fruits of their successes against the left. It was only when he finally
found that he had lost out that Bani Sadr (but not, interestingly, Bazargan, whose party continued to
operate legally but ineffectively) joined with the left Islamists of the People’s Mojahedin in an
abortive attempt to overthrow the regime.
The Khomeiniites were able to out manoeuvre the allegedly “liberal” section of the bourgeoisie
because, after beating the left, they were then able to use anti-imperialist rhetoric to mobilise
sections of the urban poor against the established bourgeoisie. They could play on the obvious gap
between the miserable lives of the masses and the “un-Islamic” lifestyles of the well to do. The left
could not resist this manoeuvre by lining up with the well to do Westernised section of the
bourgeoisie.
The key to genuinely undercutting the Khomeiniites lay in mobilising workers to fight on their own
behalf. This would have thrown both the allegedly “liberal” section of the bourgeoisie and the IRP
on to the defensive.
The workers’ struggles played a central role in the overthrow of the Shah, and in the aftermath there
were major struggles in the large factories between the factory councils and the management. But
once the Shah was removed, the workers’ struggles rarely went beyond the confines of individual
factories to contest the leadership of all the oppressed and exploited. The factory councils never
became workers’ councils on the pattern of the soviets of Russia in 1905 and 1917. [108] And
because of that failing they did not succeed in attracting behind them the mass of casual labourers,
self employed, artisans and impoverished tradesmen – the “lumpen proletariat” – who the
Khomeiniites mobilised against the left under religious slogans.
This weakness of the workers’ movement was partly a result of objective factors. There was a
division within the working class between those in the modern sector of large factories and those in
the traditional sector of small workshops (many operated by family members or their owners). The
areas that workers lived in were often numerically dominated by the impoverished sectors of the
petty bourgeoisie: there were 750,000 “merchants, middlemen and small traders” in Tehran in 1980,
as against about 400,000 workers in large industrial enterprises. [109] Very large numbers of
workers were new to industry and had few traditions of industrial struggle – 80 percent came from a
rural origin and every year 330,000 more ex-peasants flooded into the towns. [110] Only a third
were fully literate and so able to read the left’s press, although 80 percent had televisions. Finally,
the scale of repression under the Shah meant that the number of established militants in the
workplaces was very small.
But the inability of the workers’ movement to take the leadership of the wider mass movement was
not just a result of objective factors. It was also a result of the political failings of the considerable
left wing forces that existed in the post-revolutionary months. The Fedayeen and People’s
Mojahedin boasted of meetings many thousands strong, and the Mojahedin picked up a quarter of
the votes in Tehran in the elections of the spring of 1980. But the traditions of the Fedayeen and the
Mojahedin were guerrillaist, and they paid little attention to activity round the factories. Their
bastions of support were the universities, not the factory areas. Thus the People’s Mojahedin had
five “fronts” of activity: an underground organisation for preparing “armed struggle”, a youth front,
a women’s front, a bazaari front and, clearly not the top priority, a workers’ front.
What is more, the large left organisations had little to say, even when worker activists did join them.
In the vital first eight months of the revolution they made only limited criticisms of the new regime
and these consisted mainly of its failure to challenge imperialism. The People’s Mojahedin, for
instance:
Scrupulously adhered to a policy of avoiding confrontations with the clerical shadow government.
In late February when the Fedayeen organised a demonstration of over 80,000 at Tehran university
demanding land reform, the end of press censorship and the dissolution of the armed forces, the
Mojahedin stayed away. And early in March, when Western educated women celebrated
international women’s day by demonstrating against Khomeini’s decrees abrogating the Family
Protection Law, enforcing the use of the veil in government offices, and pushing the “less impartial
gender” from the judiciary, the Mojahedin warned that “imperialism was exploiting such divisive
issues”. In late March when zealous club wielders attacked the offices of the anti-clerical paper
Ayandegan, the Mojahedin said nothing. They opposed a boycott of the referendum over the Islamic
republic and Kurdish struggle for autonomy. If the nation did not remain united behind Imam
Khomeini, the Mojahedin emphasised, the imperialists would be tempted to repeat their 1953
performance. [111]
In August the Mojahedin kept silent when armed gangs attacked the Fedayeen headquarters, and
they avoided challenging IRP candidates in the 1979 elections for the Assembly of Experts.
After the occupation of the American embassy, the left became even less critical of Khomeini than
before. Khomeini,
was able to split the left opposition completely. Khomeini now declared that all problems arising in
the factories, among women and among national minorities were due to US imperialism. It was US
imperialism that was fighting the government in Kurdistan, in Tabriz, in Torkamansahra and in
Khuzistan. Women opposing Islamic laws were US and Zionist agents. Workers resisting shoras
were imperialist agents.
The Tudeh party fell in behind Khomeini’s argument and backed his line. The biggest left
organisations – the Fedayeen, the Mojahedin and the Paykar – also broke away from the struggle,
abandoning the militant workers, the women and the national minorities, among whom they had
some significant presence. [112]
The Tudeh (pro-Russian Communist) Party and the majority of the Fedayeen continued to support
Khomeini until he had fully consolidated his power in 1982, whereupon he turned on them.
As time went on, the left compounded one mistake with another. While the majority of the
Fedayeen dropped all criticism of the regime after the takeover of the US embassy, the People’s
Mojahedin eventually moved in the opposite direction, coming out in open opposition to the regime
by the end of 1980 (after the regime’s attack on its supporters in the universities). But its guerrilla
strategy then led it to play straight into the regime’s hands by joining with Bani Sadr to launch a
direct struggle for power which was not rooted at all in the day to day struggles of the mass of
people. When mass demonstrations failed to bring the regime down, its leaders fled into exile, while
its underground activists launched armed attacks on key figures in the regime: “The bombing of the
IRP’s headquarters in June 1981, which resulted in the death of Ayatollah Beheshti [IRP chairman]
and many other leaders and cadres of the IRP, provided the ulama [i.e. clergy] with the excuse to
unleash a reign of terror against the opposition unheard of in contemporary Iranian history. [113]
The left was uniting with a representative of the established bourgeoisie in a campaign of
assassinations directed against figures who the mass of people saw as playing an anti-imperialist
role. It was hardly surprising that the impoverished petty bourgeois and lumpen supporters of the
IRP identified with its leaders in the onslaught against the left. These leaders found it easy to
portray the left as working hand in hand with imperialist opponents of the revolution – an argument
which gained even greater credibility a couple of years later when the People’s Mojahedin joined in
the onslaught against Iran waged by the Iraqi army.
In fact, the Mojahedin was displaying all the faults which characterise the radical new petty
bourgeoisie in many Third World countries, whether it is organised in Islamist, Maoist or nationalist
parties. It sees the political struggle as dependent upon a minority acting as a “vanguard” in
isolation from the struggle of the masses. The battle for power is reduced to the armed coup on the
one hand and the alliance with existing bourgeois forces on the other. With “leadership” such as
this, it is not surprising that the most radical workers were not able to build the militant struggles in
individual factories into a movement capable of uniting behind it the mass of urban poor and
peasants, and so left a vacuum which the IRP was able to fill.
Not all the left were as bad as the Mojahedin, the Fedayeen majority or the Tudeh Party. But these
constituted the major forces to which those radicalised by the revolutionary experience looked.
Their failings were a very important factor in allowing the Khomeini group to retain the initiative
and to rebuild a weakened state into a powerful instrument capable of the most bloody repression.
Finally, even those on the left who did not make mistakes on the scale of the Mojahedin, Fedayeen
and Tudeh Party made mistakes of their own. They had all been brought up on Stalinist or Maoist
traditions which made them search for a “progressive” section of the bourgeoisie or petty
bourgeoisie to lead the struggle. If they decided a certain movement was of the “progressive” or
“anti-imperialist” petty bourgeoisie, then they would dampen down any criticism. If, on the other
hand, they decided a certain movement was not of the “progressive petty bourgeoisie”, then they
concluded it could never, ever, engage in any conflict with imperialism. They had no understanding
that again and again in Third World countries bourgeois and petty bourgeois leaders who are pro-
capitalist and extremely reactionary in their social attitudes have, despite themselves, been drawn
into conflicts with imperialism. This was, for instance, true of Kemal Ataturk in Turkey, of Grivas
and Makarios in Cyprus, of Kenyatta in Kenya, of Nehru and Gandhi in India, and most recently of
Saddam Hussein in Iraq. This has often given them a popularity with those they are intent on
exploiting and oppressing.
The left cannot undercut that either by extolling them as “progressive, anti-imperialist” heroes, or
by pretending that the confrontation with imperialism does not matter. Instead the left has at all
costs to preserve its own political independence, insisting on public criticism of such figures both
for their domestic policies and for their inevitable failings in the struggle with imperialism, while
making it clear that we want imperialism to be defeated much more than they do.
Unfortunately, virtually the whole of the Iranian left flip flopped from one mistaken position to
another, so that they ended up taking a neutral stand in the final months of the first Gulf War when
the US fleet intervened directly to tilt the balance against Iran. They did not understand that there
were ways of taking an anti-imperialist stance that would have strengthened the fight against the
Iranian regime at home (denouncing the refusal of the regime to make the rich pay for the war,
criticising the barbaric and futile “human wave” tactics of sending lightly armed infantry into
frontal attacks on heavily defended Iraqi positions, condemning the failure to put forward a
programme that would arouse the Iraqi workers and minorities to rise against Saddam Hussein,
denouncing the call for war reparations as making the Iraqi people pay for their rulers crimes, and
so on). Instead, they adopted a position which cut them off from anyone in Iran who remembered
what imperialism had done to the country in the past and who could see that it would do so again if
it got the chance.
The victory of Khomeini’s forces in Iran was not, then, inevitable, and neither does it prove that
Islamism is a uniquely reactionary force against which the left must be prepared to unite with the
devil (or rather, the Great Satan) of imperialism and its local allies. It merely confirms that, in the
absence of independent working class leadership, revolutionary upheaval can give way to more than
one form of the restabilisation of bourgeois rule under a repressive, authoritarian, one party state.
The secret ingredient in this process was not the allegedly “medieval” character of Islam, but the
vacuum created by the failure of the socialist organisations to give leadership to an inexperienced
but very combative working class.

Notes
92. This is the view put forward by F. Halliday, op. cit.. It was the view put forward in relation to
Stalinism by Max Shachtman and others. See M. Shachtman, The Bureaucratic Revolution (New
York, 1962), and, for a critique, T. Cliff, Appendix 2: The theory of Bureaucratic Collectivism, in
State Capitalism in Russia (London, 1988).
93. The position of much of the left today in both Algeria and Egypt.
94. H.E. Chehabi, op. cit., p.169.
95. For details, see A. Bayat, op. cit., pp.101-102, 128-129.
96. Figures given in Ibid., p.108.
97. M.M. Salehi, Insurgency through Culture and Religion (New York, 1988), p.171.
98. H.E. Chehabi, op. cit., p.169.
99. The figure is given in D Hiro, op. cit., p.187.
100. See ch.3 of my Class Struggles in Eastern Europe, 1945-83 (London, 1983).
101. T Cliff, Deflected Permanent Revolution, International Socialism, first series, no.12 (Spring,
1963), reprinted in International Socialism, first series, no.61. Unfortunately, this very important
article is not reprinted in the selection of Cliff’s writings, Neither Washington nor Moscow, but it is
available as a pamphlet from Bookmarks.
102. Still less did they represent, as Halliday seems to contend, “the strength of pre-capitalist social
forces”, op. cit., p.35. By making such an assertion Halliday is only showing how much his own
Maoist-Stalinist origins have prevented him understanding the character of capitalism in the present
century.
103. As P. Marshall seems to imply in an otherwise excellent book Revolution and Counter
Revolution in Iran, op. cit..
104. A. Bayat, op. cit., p.134.
105. T. Cliff, op. cit.
106. M. Moaddel, op. cit., p.212.
107. F. Halliday, op. cit., p.57.
108. Maryam Poya is mistaken to use the term “workers’ councils” to translate “shoras” in her
article, Iran 1979: Long Live the Revolution ... Long Live Islam? in Revolutionary Rehearsals
(Bookmarks, London, 1987).
109. According to M. Moaddel, op. cit., p.238.
110. A. Bayat, op. cit., p.42.
111. E. Abrahamian, The Iranian Mojahedin, op. cit., p.189.
112. M Poya, op. cit..
113. M. Moaddel, op. cit., p.216.

The contradictions of Islamism: Sudan

Iran is not the only country in which Islamists have exercised power. In the last few years the
Sudanese Islamic Brotherhood, the Ikhwan al Muslimin, has become the decisive influence in a
military government through the National Islamic Front (NIF).
The Sudanese Brotherhood began in the 1940s as an offshoot of Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood in
Egypt, but took on a life of its own with its own doctrines, after the crushing of the parent
organisation by Nasser in the 1950s. The organisation originated in Khartoum University, where it
battled with the Communists for influence over the students. This led to its first leadership
emphasising the radical elements in Islamism. But in the 1960s a new leadership, under Hassan al-
Turabi, succeeded in widening the base of the organisation, adding thousands of newcomers to its
2,000 hardcore members. “The membership also witnessed a significant diversification by the
involvement of ulama, mosque imams, merchants, Sufi leaders and others, although the proportion
of nonmodern educated elements remained small in the active membership”. [114] In the 1980s it
grew further, aided by the emergence (under state encouragement) of an “Islamic” financial sector:
“The employment policy of the Islamic Bank, which favoured religious people, was helpful to
Ikhwan”. The Islamic institutions led to “the evolution of a totally new class of businessmen who
became rich overnight” and “opened up avenues of economic mobility for many who would
otherwise have been, at most, higher civil servants”. The Brotherhood did not own the Islamic
banks – they were financed by a combination of Saudi money and local capital. But it exerted
enormous power by its ability “to influence loans and other advances to customers”. [115] This
translated itself into support for the Brotherhood among some of the new rich and within the state
machine itself: “The movement continued to be based on a hard core of activists, mostly modern
educated professionals, but a significant contingent of businessmen (or professionals turned
executives) started to acquire prominence”. [116]
In the 1986 elections after the overthrow of the Nimeiry dictatorship the Brotherhood’s front, the
NIF, won only 18.5 percent of the total vote, most votes going to the traditional parties. But it
picked up no fewer than 23 out of 28 of the seats elected by university graduates only, and it soon
became clear it had enough support among a section of the urban middle classes and businessmen to
be the natural ally of key figures in the armed forces. A coup in 1989 gave power to General Bashir,
but effective power seemed to be in the hands of the NIF. And since then Khartoum has become one
of the centres of the international Islamist movement, a pole of attraction to rival Tehran and Riyadh
for the activists.
Yet the Sudanese Brotherhood’s rise to power has not been an easy one. It has repeatedly come
close to losing many members and much of its support. And its tenure in power is not likely to be
secure.
Turabi has sought to build the Brotherhood’s influence when his rivals have been in government by
agitating among the students, the middle class and, to some extent, the workers – but he has then
seized every chance of participating in government himself so as to increase the Brotherhood’s
influence within the hierarchies of the state. This he first did in the early 1960s. The Brotherhood’s
agitation among students helped precipitate the October 1964 revolution of students, middle class
professionals and workers. It then used its position in the new government to dampen down the
wave of radicalisation and to push for the banning of the Communists – so winning to it some of the
conservative privileged groups.
It followed the same manoeuvre again after a military coup put General Gaafar al-Nimeiry in power
in May 1969. He repressed the Brotherhood along with the traditional parties for a period. But its
spell in opposition allowed it to rebuild some of the popular support it had lost while in
government, taking the lead in agitation over student conditions and leading an unsuccessful student
rising against the regime in 1973. Then in the late 1970s it seized on an offer from Nimeiry of
“National Reconciliation” to join his regime, with Turabi becoming attorney general “in charge of
the review of laws to make them conform to the sharia”. [117] It was during this time that it used
the development of the Islamic financial sector to get roots among the owners of capital. It was also
during this period that it began to win over certain army officers.
Yet these manoeuvres created continual tensions within the Brotherhood and repeatedly threatened
its wider base of support. The original cadres of the Brotherhood from the early 1950s were not at
all happy with its leader’s cultivation of sections of the traditional elite and of the new rich. Turabi’s
methods did not seem at all to fit the original notion of an Islamic vanguard which they had held as
radical students in the 1940s. He seemed, to them, to be watering down Islamic ideas in order to
gain respectability – especially when he set out to recruit women, supported them having the vote
and produced a pamphlet asserting that “genuine” Islam should give them the same rights as men.
[118] To the dissidents it seemed that he was simply out to pander to the secular middle classes. On
top of this Nimeiry was someone who was notorious for his non-Islamic behaviour – particularly
his drinking. A group of older members preferred the radicalism of someone like Qutb, and finally
split away to form an organisation of their own linked to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. [119]
Collaboration with an increasingly unpopular regime began to undercut the Brotherhood’s wider
support. The early 1980s saw a growing wave of popular agitation against Nimeiry, with student
demonstrations in 1981-2, a strike by rail workers in 1982, mutinies by southern troops in 1983
followed by strikes of judges and doctors. Through this period the Brotherhood became the only
force outside the regime itself supporting Nimeiry, and began to fear being destroyed alongside the
dictator when he eventually fell.
Then Nimeiry took a last gamble. He announced the immediate introduction of the sharia into law.
The Brotherhood had no choice but to throw their weight behind him. For more than 30 years the
“return to the sharia” had been their answer to all of Sudan’s problems. It was the single, simple
slogan which connected their brand of reform with the Islamic traditions of the mass of people
outside the urban middle class. And so they began agitation to support implementation of the sharia,
in the face of resistance from the judges and much of the legal system. A million people joined a
Brotherhood demonstration for an international conference on the implementation of the sharia, and
Brotherhood members helped man the special sharia courts set up by Nimeiry.
This increased the Brotherhood’s pull among certain traditionalist circles, especially when the
courts began to pick upon certain prominent people and expose their corruption. And the new power
it exercised increased its attraction to those in the state machine looking for promotion. But while
making the Brotherhood popular among some traditionalist sections of the population and more
influential among those who ran the state, the measures also massively increased resentment against
them elsewhere. It upset those who were seculist or supporters of non-Islamic religions (the
majority of the population in the south of the country) without being, in reality, able to improve the
conditions of the Islamic masses. The myth of the sharia was that of a new legal system which
would end all injustices. But this could not be brought about by any reform that was merely a legal
reform, and least of all one introduced by a corrupt and unpopular regime. So all the new law really
meant was a resort to sharia punishments, the hudud – amputation for theft, stoning for adultery,
and so on.
In the 1960s the Brotherhood had been able to build itself among the urban intelligentsia in part
because it down played this aspect of the sharia. The Islamic orthodoxy accepted by Turabi was to
“skirt the issue by insisting the hudud was only applicable in an ideal Islamic society from which
want had been completely banished”. [120] Now, however, the most tangible evidence that the
sharia was changing the legal system became the use of such punishments, and Turabi did a 180
degree turn, attacking those who claimed you could not impose morality on people by legislation”.
[121]
Associated with resentment against the sharia courts was resentment against the Islamic financial
sector. This had enabled some members of the middle class to move upwards into important
business sectors. But it necessarily left many, many more disappointed:
Resentment was created in the business community and among thousands of aspirants who believed
the main reason they were deprived of the benefits of the new system was Ikhwan favouritism ... In
the end, allegations about Ikhwan’s abuse of the Islamic banking system were the single most
damaging liability that emerged from the Nimeiry era and discredited them in the eyes of large
sections of the population. [122]
Finally, the Brotherhood’s alliance with Nimeiry over the sharia forced it to excuse everything else
he did, at a time when there was a growing agitation against him. Even though Nimeiry, under US
pressure, finally moved against the Brotherhood just before a popular rising overthrew him, it was
too late for the Brotherhood to be identified in any sense with the revolution.
It survived, to take greater power than ever into its hands within four years, because it offered to
those army officers who had finally turned against Nimeiry something no one else had – thousands
of active members prepared to back them in their bitter civil war against non-Muslim rebels in the
south of the country and in their repression of discontent in the towns of the north. The coalition of
secular forces that had led the uprising against Nimeiry were paralysed by their opposed class
interests, unable either to focus the discontent into a movement for a complete transformation of
society, including massive redistribution of wealth and the granting of self determination to the
south, or to crush it. This allowed the Brotherhood increasingly to offer itself to the army officers as
the only force capable of imposing stability, showing its strength visibly by organising a large
demonstration against any concessions to the southern rebels. So it was that in 1989 when the
military seized power once more, in order to pre-empt a proposed peace agreement between the
government and the rebels, it connived with the Brotherhood.
In power, however, the Brotherhood has known only one answer to the problems that face the
regime – increasingly severe repression wrapped in religious terminology. In March 1991 the sharia
was reintroduced together with the hudud punishments. The war in the south has now been matched
by repression against other non-Arab communities, including the Fur and the Nuba, despite Turabi’s
claims, when in opposition, to oppose any form of Islam based on Arab chauvinism. Typical of the
repression against those who oppose the war in the south were the death sentences handed out two
years ago to a group of people in Dafur for “inciting war against the state and possessing weapons”.
One man was sentenced to be hanged and then his body to be publicly crucified. [123] In the run up
to elections in trade union and professional bodies there were reports of intimidation, arrests and
torture. [124] Even some of the traditionalists who supported the campaign of Islamisation are now
on the receiving end of repression. The regime has been tightening its grip on Sufi sects “whose
sermons are believed to be nurturing popular discontent” [125], and most people blame the regime
and the Brotherhood for a bomb attack on a Sufi mosque earlier this year which killed 16 people.
Repression has not, however, provided more than temporary stability to the regime. There were a
series of riots in the towns two years ago as a result of shortages and price increases. Initial gestures
of defiance to the IMF have been followed by an Economic Salvation Programme based upon
“economic liberation” which “involves many policies previously advocated by the fund” [126],
leading to new negotiations with the IMF. This has led to a sharp decline in living standards, further
discontent and further riots.
Meanwhile, the regime is isolated internationally from the other major Islamic regimes: the
Brotherhood fell out with Iran by lining up against it in the first Gulf War, and with Saudi Arabia by
supporting Iraq in the second Gulf War. Presumably because of this it has tried to present itself as a
pole of attraction to Islamists elsewhere who are disaffected with these two countries and with the
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood – even though Turabi’s own policies have been, for 30 years, a long
way from the radicalism these Islamist groups espouse.
Yet the Sudanese Brotherhood itself is under enormous pressure. “There are rumours that the NIF
might split in two, with the zealots being sidelined and the relatively more moderate faction joining
the conservative wings of the Umma Party and the DUP [the two main traditional parties]. There are
divisions between the NIF’s older generation who are prepared to accommodate with the secular
parties and the younger and uncompromising zealots. [127]
One final point is worth making about Sudan. The rise of the Brotherhood to power there has not
been because of any magic powers on its own part. Rather the cause lies in the failure of other
political forces to provide the way out of the progressively deeper impasse in the country. In the
1950s and the 1960s the Communist Party was a stronger force than the Brotherhood. It had
competed with the Brotherhood for influence among the students and built up a following among
urban trade unionists. But in 1964 and 1969 it chose to use this influence, not to present a
revolutionary programme for change, but to enter non-revolutionary governments, which then
turned on it once it had calmed down the wave of popular agitation. It was, in particular, its support
for Nimeiry in his first years that gave the Brotherhood the chance to take the lead in university
agitation and undercut the Communists’ base.

Notes
114. Abdelwahab el-Affendi, Turabi’s revolution, Islam and power in Sudan (London, 1991), p.89.
115. Ibid., pp.116-117.
116. Ibid., p.117.
117. Ibid., p.115.
118. For his position on women, see summary of his pamphlet in Ibid., p.174. See also his article,
Le Nouveau Reveil de l’Islam, op. cit..
119. Affendi, op. cit., p.118.
120. Ibid., p.163.
121. Ibid., pp.163-164.
122. Ibid., p.116.
123. Amnesty International report, quoted in Economist Intelligence Unit Report, Sudan, 1992:4.
124. Ibid.
125. Economist Intelligence Unit Report, Sudan, 1993:3.
126. Economist Intelligence Unit, Country Profile, Sudan, 1993-4. Turabi himself has been keen to
insist that “the Islamic awakening is no longer interested in fighting the West ... The West is not an
enemy for us”. Le nouveau Reveil de l’Islam, op. cit.
127. Economist Intelligence Unit Report, Sudan, 1993:1.

Conclusions
It has been a mistake on the part of socialists to see Islamist movements either as automatically
reactionary and “fascist” or as automatically “antiimperialist” and “progressive”. Radical Islamism,
with its project of reconstituting society on the model established by Mohammed in 7th century
Arabia, is, in fact, a “utopia” emanating from an impoverished section of the new middle class. As
with any “petty bourgeois utopia” [128], its supporters are, in practice, faced with a choice between
heroic but futile attempts to impose it in opposition to those who run existing society, or
compromising with them, providing an ideological veneer to continuing oppression and
exploitation. It is this which leads inevitably to splits between a radical, terrorist wing of Islamism
on the one hand, and a reformist wing on the others. It is also this which leads some of the radicals
to switch from using arms to try to bring about a society without “oppressors” to using them to
impose “Islamic” forms of behaviour on individuals.
Socialists cannot regard petty bourgeois utopians as our prime enemies. They are not responsible for
the system of international capitalism, the subjection of thousands of millions of people to the blind
drive to accumulate, the pillaging of whole continents by the banks, or the machinations that have
produced a succession of horrific wars since the proclamation of the “new world order”. They were
not responsible for the horrors of the first Gulf War, which began with an attempt by Saddam
Hussein to do a favour for the US and the Gulf sheikdoms, and ended with direct US intervention
on Iraq’s side. They were not to blame for the carnage in Lebanon, where the Falangist onslaught,
the Syrian intervention against the left and the Israeli invasion created the conditions which bred
militant Shiism. They were not to blame for the second Gulf War, with the “precision bombing” of
Baghdad hospitals and the slaughter of 80,000 people as they fled from Kuwait to Basra. Poverty,
misery, persecution, suppression of human rights, would exist in countries like Egypt and Algeria
even if the Islamists disappeared tomorrow.
For these reasons socialists cannot support the state against the Islamists. Those who do so, on the
grounds that the Islamists threaten secular values, merely make it easier for the Islamists to portray
the left as part of an “infidel”, “secularist” conspiracy of the “oppressors” against the most
impoverished sections of society. They repeat the mistakes made by the left in Algeria and Egypt
when they praised regimes that were doing nothing for the mass of people as “progressive’ –
mistakes that enabled the Islamists to grow. And they forget that any support the state gives to
secularist values is only contingent: when it suits it, it will do a deal with the more conservative of
the Islamists to impose bits of the shariah – especially the bits which inflict harsh punishment on
people – in return for ditching the radicals with their belief in challenging oppression. This is what
happened in Pakistan under Zia and the Sudan under Nimeiry, and it is apparently what the Clinton
adminstration has been advising the Algerian generals to do.
But socialists cannot give support to the Islamists either. That would be to call for the swapping of
one form of oppression for another, to react to the violence of the state by abandoning the defence
of ethnic and religious minorities, women and gays, to collude in scapegoating that makes it
possible for capitalist exploitation to continue unchecked providing it takes “Islamic” forms. It
would be to abandon the goal of independent socialist politics, based on workers in struggle
organising all the oppressed and exploited behind them, for a tail-ending of a petty bourgeois
utopianism which cannot even succeed in its own terms.
The Islamists are not our allies. They are representatives of a class which seeks to influence the
working class, and which, in so far as it succeeds, pulls workers either in the direction of futile and
disastrous adventurism or in the direction of a reactionary capitulation to the existing system – or
often to the first followed by the second.
But this does not mean we can simply take an abstentionist, dismissive attitude to the Islamists.
They grow on the soil of very large social groups that suffer under existing society, and whose
feeling of revolt could be tapped for progressive purposes, providing a lead came from a rising level
of workers’ struggle. And even short of such a rise in the struggle, many of the individuals attracted
to radical versions of Islamism can be influenced by socialists – provided socialists combine
complete political independence from all forms of Islamism with a willingness to seize
opportunities to draw individual Islamists into genuinely radical forms of struggle alongside them.
Radical Islamism is full of contradictions. The petty bourgeoisie is always pulled in two directions –
towards radical rebellion against existing society and towards compromise with it. And so Islamism
is always caught between rebelling in order to bring about a complete resurrection of the Islamic
community, and compromising in order to impose Islamic “reforms”. These contradictions
inevitably express themselves in the most bitter, often violent, conflicts within and between Islamist
groups.
Those who treat Islamism as a uniquely reactionary monolith forget that there were conflicts
between the different Islamists over the attitude they should take when Saudi Arabia and Iran were
on opposite sides during the first Gulf War. There were the arguments that led the FIS in Algeria to
break with its Saudi backers, or Islamists in Turkey to organise pro-Iraqi demonstrations from Saudi
financed mosques during the second Gulf War. There are the bitter armed battles which wage
between the rival Islamist armies in Afghanistan. Today there are arguments within the Hamas
organisation among Palestinians about whether or not they should compromise with Arafat’s rump
Palestinian administration – and therefore indirectly with Israel – in return for its implementing
Islamic laws. Such differences in the attitude necessarily arise once “reformist” Islam does deals
with existing states that are integrated into the world system. For each of these states is in rivalry
with the others, and each of them strikes its own deals with the dominant imperialisms.
Similar differences are bound to arise every time there is a rise in the level of workers’ struggle.
Those who finance the Islamist organisations will want to end such struggle, if not break it. Some of
the radical young Islamists will instinctively support the struggle. The leaders of the organisations
will be stuck in the middle, muttering about the need of the employers to show charity and the
workers forbearance.
Finally, the very development of capitalism itself forces the Islamist leaders to do ideological
somersaults whenever they get close to power. They counterpose “Islamic” to “Western values”.
But most so called Western values are not rooted in some mythical European culture, but arise out
of the development of capitalism over the last two centuries. Thus a century and a half ago the
dominant attitude among the English middle class to sexuality was remarkably similar to that
preached by the Islamic revivalists today (sex outside of marriage was forbidden, women were not
supposed to bare even their ankles, illegitimacy was a taint people could not live down), and women
had fewer rights in some respects than most versions of Islam grant them today (inheritance was to
the eldest son only, while Islam gives the daughter half the son’s portion; there was no right at all to
divorce, while Islam grants women that right in very restricted circumstances). What changed
English attitudes was not something inbuilt into the Western psyche or any alleged “Judeo-Christian
values”, but the impact of developing capitalism – the way in which its need for women’s labour
power forced it to change certain attitudes and, more importantly, put women in a situation where
they could demand even greater changes.
That is why even in countries where the Catholic church used to be immensely strong, like Ireland,
Italy, Poland and Spain, it has had to accept, reluctantly, a diminution in its influence. The countries
where Islam is the state religion cannot immunise themselves from the pressure for similar changes,
however hard they try.
This is shown by the experience of Iranian Islamic Republic. Despite all the propaganda about
women’s main role being as mothers and wives and all the pressure to drive them out of certain
professions like the law, the proportion of women in the workforce has grown slightly and they
continue to make up 28 percent of government employees, the same as at the time of the revolution.
[129] Against this background, the regime has had to shift its stance on birth control, with 23
percent of women using contraceptives [130], and on occasions to relax the strict enforcement of
the veil. Although women are denied equal rights with men when it comes to divorce and family
law, they retain the vote (there are two women MPs), attend school, get a quota of places in
university in all disciplines and are encouraged to study medicine and to receive military training.
[131] As Abrahamian notes of Khomeini:
His closest disciples often mocked the “traditionalists” for being “old fashioned”. They accused
them of obsessing over ritual purity; preventing their daughters from going to school; insisting that
young girls should be veiled even when no men were present; denouncing such intellectual pursuits
as art, music and chess playing; and, worst of all, refusing to take advantage of newspapers, radios
and televisions. [132]
None of this should really be surprising. Those who run Iranian capitalism and the Iranian state
cannot dispense with female labour power in key sections of the economy. And those sections of the
petty bourgeoisie who have formed the backbone of the IRP started sending their daughters to
university and to seek employment in the 1970s precisely because they wanted the extra salaries –
to enlarge the family income and to make their daughters more marriageable. They have not been
willing in the 1980s to write these off in the interests of religious piety.
Islamism cannot freeze economic and therefore social development any more than any other
ideology can. And therefore again and again tensions will arise within it and find expression in
bitter ideological disputes between its proponents.
The Islamist youth are usually intelligent and articulate products of modern society. They read
books and newspapers and watch televisions, and so know all the divisions and clashes within their
own movements. However much they may close ranks when faced with “secularists”, whether from
the left or from the bourgeoisie, they will argue furiously with each other – just as the pro-Russian
and pro-Chinese wings of the apparently monolithic world Stalinist movement did 30 years ago.
And these arguments will begin to create secret doubts in the minds of at least some of them.
Socialists can take advantage of these contradictions to begin to make some of the more radical
Islamists question their allegiance to its ideas and organisations – but only if we can establish
independent organisations of our own, which are not identified with either the Islamists or the state.
On some issues we will find ourselves on the same side as the Islamists against imperialism and the
state. This was true, for instance, in many countries during the second Gulf War. It should be true in
countries like France or Britain when it comes to combating racism. Where the Islamists are in
opposition, our rule should be, “with the Islamists sometimes, with the state never”.
But even then we continue to disagree with the Islamists on basic issues. We are for the right to
criticise religion as well as the right to practise it. We are for the right not to wear the veil as well as
the right of young women in racist countries like France to wear it if they so wish. We are against
discrimination against Arab speakers by big business in countries like Algeria – but we are also
against discrimination against the Berber speakers and those sections of workers and the lower
middle class who have grown up speaking French. Above all, we are against any action which sets
one section of the exploited and oppressed against another section on the grounds of religion or
ethnic origin. And that means that as well as defending Islamists against the state we will also be
involved in defending women, gays, Berbers or Copts against some Islamists.
When we do find ourselves on the same side as the Islamists, part of our job is to argue strongly
with them, to challenge them – and not just on their organisations’ attitude to women and
minorities, but also on the fundamental question of whether what is needed is charity from the rich
or an overthrow of existing class relations.
The left has made two mistakes in relation to the Islamists in the past. The first has been to write
them off as fascists, with whom we have nothing in common. The second has been to see them as
“progressives” who must not be criticised. These mistakes have jointly played a part in helping the
Islamists to grow at the expense of the left in much of the Middle East. The need is for a different
approach that sees Islamism as the product of a deep social crisis which it can do nothing to resolve,
and which fights to win some of the young people who support it to a very different, independent,
revolutionary socialist perspective.

Notes
128. This was the quite correct description of the ideas of the People’s Mojahedin provided by the
section of the leadership and membership who split away in the mid-1970s to form the organisation
that later took the name Paykar. Unfortunately, this organisation continued to base itself on
guerrillaism and Maoism rather than genuine revolutionary Marxism.
129. V. Moghadam, Women, Work and Ideology in the Islamic Republic, International Journal of
Middle East Studies, 1988, p.230.
130. Ibid., p.227.
131. Ibid.
132. E. Abrahamian, Khomeinism, op. cit., p.16.